Who cares about W3C validation?

While reseaching a piece in today’s IT Week, I checked out several prominent home pages in the W3C Markup Validation Service. There wasn’t room for all the results in the piece, so I’m posting them below, best to worst:

  • ibm.com: passed
  • sun.com: 1 error
  • microsoft.com: 2 errors
  • digg.com: 5 errors
  • adobe.com: 15 errors
  • redhat.com: 18 errors
  • yahoo.com: 41 errors
  • google.com: 43 errors
  • bbc.co.uk: 45 errors
  • myspace.com: 130 errors
  • ebay.com: 263 errors
  • amazon.com: 1134 errors

Disclaimer: This was early last week; the exact figures will have changed by now. I found it interesting that only IBM managed a pass, others such as Microsoft and Sun are clearly trying to comply, while the likes of MySpace, eBay and Amazon apparently could not care less.

Does anybody care? Mostly not; all we care about is web sites that work in our favourite browser, though in theory there is a connection between the two. Which was the point of my article: the W3C seems to be of decreasing relevance these days.

Still, kudos to IBM.

Tags: