Only 2.6% of the most visited websites have fully valid HTML

https://validatehtml.com/html-error-statistics

13•theo_dcrx•1h ago

Comments

cyanbane•32m ago

I would def argue this is a feature of the net ( that people from all walks of browsers can see mostly the same thing ) and not a bug.

hodder•31m ago

And not a single person cares. What does fully valid even mean anymore?

blakesterz•28m ago

  "Accessibility failures are near-universal."

Why does it seem like Accessibility is always an after thought? It is usually so easy to do while a site is built. We just don't think about it until someone complains?

tdeck•23m ago

Almost nobody is testing their website with a screen reader so they don't think of it as part of the user experience. In fact, I think most developers are only vaguely aware of what web accessibility actually is for and how it affects users.

collabs•28m ago

I would be interested to see if the metric moves meaningfully based on switching to a different set of parameters for example running from the US vs the EU and multiple attempts over multiple days to see if anything changes...

rogix•26m ago

At this point, with all the tools available, if your site does not have fully valid HTML, it is because you don't care. LLMs are your friends, dev.

personalityson•24m ago

HN is not one of them https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombina...

alt227•23m ago

This is exactly why HTML is so ubiquitous, because it is so tolerant of mistakes in formatting, syntax, and just about anything else.

Most browsers will even read and process most of the things listed on this page because even if the spec doesnt say so, it just makes sense to anyway.

dylan604•16m ago

Is HTML that way because of it being HTML, or have browsers just decided to brute force their way into handling the slop so that people won't blame the browser for not doing it correctly?

alt227•11m ago

In my experience a lot of the "best practice" warnings are reductive.

A couple examples from this list are not requiring a type parameter on certain tags, or style tags being valid under html and body tags but not div tags. These types of things would take extra coding in a browser to check for certain singular tags not requiring things that all others do. Therefore it is simpler to leave these checks out and leave sloppy syntax checking as it does no harm at all to the rendered markup.

You may be right in some situations, but the nature of HTML having everything applied to all tags and then selectively reduced definitely helps make it a more resilient and accommodating language.

JSR_FDED•19m ago

50% of my errors are “<font> is deprecated”. If browsers stop supporting that I’m guessing huge swathes of the web will be affected, so I’m guessing it will never happen.

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