State of Validation 2003. Off the 430 W3C members, only 28 (6.5%) have sites that validate with the W3C validator as either HTML or XHTML! This represents an increase in standards compliance of 75.7% from the year ago tests. [via the big orange Z]
posted on Feb 25, 2003 - View this thread

99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete An excerpt from an upcoming book by Mr. Zeldman in which he continues to argue the practice of standards compliance - "Held up as a Holy Grail of professional development practice, backward compatibility sounds good in theory. But the cost is too high and the practice has always been based on a lie." I enjoy his writing but he seems to be repeating himself as usual. Still, it is a good argument: where do we focus our priorities for future development - pure standards compliant CSS models, backwards compatibility, or somewhere in between? I know this has been discussed before but thought it postworthy due to the new book and all.
posted on Sep 6, 2002 - View this thread

The Web Standards Project is back, now in easy-to-swallow blog form. Stand up straight! Close that HTML tag! And wipe that silly browser off your hard drive, mister! And the other one.
posted on Jun 11, 2002 - View this thread

What hasn't been noted much on the DEN and boo.com closings is the high-bandwidth aspirations both sites trumpeted. No doubt this is why much of Metafilter's readership is privately reveling in these failures. They subtly reinforce the Web's "minimum" ideals -- keeping multimedia to a minimum, minimizing file sizes and download times, letting the minimalist purity of HTML reign supreme. Should this really make us happy, though? I'm a big supporter of fast browsing and markup-language standards, but aren't we missing the point when we secretly root for the bleeding edge to fail?
posted on May 19, 2000 - View this thread