I suppose it is like politicians who say what we want to hear but don’t practice what they preach. By the time they get power, they are already too corrupted to use it for the good of the people.

And I think that is perfectly okay- as long as you know WHY it doesn’t validate (I.e ‘because of cost-ineffectivity, I decided not to fix that’) and of course as long as you know the proper rules and guidelines the W3C outlines.

Web standards advocates need to spend more effort throwing ad giants Google, Yahoo! even DoubleClick under a giant bus.

The necessary changes are not technically difficult.

I believe one should practice what they preach. In the world of standards compliancy, I also think it’s important to understand why validation is important. Many people (me included) have fallen into the trap of simply validating because that’s what standards enthusiasts do.

Ted, may I ask if you know what were the most common errors within the sites, besides the DOCTYPE declaration?

Even so, I personally think a site with only a few errors (say, under 10) is doing a pretty good job with standards.

Unfortunately, the web bot (which did most of the scanning) did not record what actually caused validation errors. I did about 50 manually and found that odd characters (such has ‘&’, ?, etc.) in links threw off the validator. Also, a lot of images declared height, width, and border in the markup (rather than CSS). Forms also threw off the validation process.

I did not have the means to dive deeply into the cause of each validation error. This would make for a very interesting study in itself.

Nice post - love the visuals!