Web design: Standards compliance
Yesterday I wrote about the improved markup on my sites. Although I didn’t mention it explicitly, it almost goes without saying that almost all my webpages are now conforming to the W3C HTML and CSS3 specifications. Although I think in terms of HTML5 and use the HTML5 semantics in most cases, the doctype is still XHTML 1.0 Strict. Now, on one single page, I do actually use the HTML5 <video>
tag. Of course, this makes that page a non-conforming XHTML 1.0 Strict document, but in practice there is no problem at all: every HTML5-aware browser I know of will display the video just fine, as if the doctype was the HTML5 one. I will soon upgrade to the HTML5 doctype, and then 100 % of my webpages will be standards-compliant.
It is somewhat interesting to examine the standard compliance of external major websites. It turns out that many, if not most, actually are non-conforming. Here are a few examples:
Website | Doctype | HTML status | CSS status |
---|---|---|---|
rejbrand.se | XHTML 1.0 Strict | Valid | Valid |
svt.se | HTML5 | Invalid (not far from valid) | Invalid |
datormagazin.se | HTML 4.01 Transitional | Invalid | Invalid |
bbc.co.uk | XHTML + RDFa | Valid | Invalid |
microsoft.com | HTML5 | Invalid | Invalid |
apple.com | HTML5 | Invalid (not far from valid) | Invalid |
adlibris.se | HTML5 | Invalid | Invalid |
google.com | HTML5 | Invalid | Invalid |
w3.org | XHTML 1.0 Strict | Valid | Valid |
In most cases, I have examined only the main page of the site. I suppose most big sites use frameworks making each page comparable to each other page in terms of overall markup and page layout.