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Copyright (c) 2002 Toby A Inkster.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

Introduction

Here is the reason why most websites suck... but this one doesn't!

An organisation called The W3C has the job of deciding the standards of HTML - the language which the WWW is written in.

My pages are written in the current latest version of HTML - HTML 4.01. I carefully write them in this language by hand (I use a few special HTML tools to help me though. All these tools were custom-built by myself, so using them is - I feel - equivalent to hand-writing the pages!).

The reason I do this is to make sure that I adhere to the strict standards of HTML 4.01. If I used a WYSIWYG program to make this website it probably wouldn't meet the standards. (but now I'm straying into a whole other "Why XXXX sucks")

So... why do I want to meet the standards? It's pretty simple really. For example, I speak English. If I went around speaking in a particular English dialect - for example, Cockney - the language of Londoners - not all English speakers would be able to understand me. And so I try to speak in plain and proper English so that everybody can understand what I say. Similarly, I try to use plain and proper HTML to write my web pages. By doing this, I can be sure that anyone using any browser should be able to read this site.

Excuses

However, most of the sites out there on the WWW do not adhere to these standards. Here are some of the common excuses...

I checked the site in Internet Explorer and Netscape and it worked fine.

Some people seem to think that checking their sites in "The Big Two" is enough, but it's not! There are so many other browsers that will be reading your page - "alternative" browsers like Opera, Lynx and Mozilla; "accessible" browsers for the visually impaired; services that let you read the web on your TV, mobile phone or personal organiser; and even browsers that you don't even think of as browsers, like the search engine "bots" that scan the web, looking for sites to add to their databases.

It would be too much work to fix all my pages.

I managed it. The Toby-Inkster.co.uk banner covers over 700 pages.

People should use Internet Explorer to view my site.

Think! If I had a big sign plastered up on my website saying "Use Opera 5.0 to view my site" would you download Opera 5.0 and use it to view my site? No, of course not - you'd just go to another site. That's just what everyone using Netscape/Opera/Mozilla/etc/etc/etc does when they see your site!

Practice What You Preach

As stated on my front page this site is 100% HTML 4.01 compliant. It also uses CSS 1 and is 100% compliant with the relevent standards for that technology too.

Checking Up

You can test how well web pages comply with HTML standards by using the W3C HTML Validation Service and the W3C CSS Validation Service.

Here are a few notable web-sites that are not written in valid HTML:

Other sites whose HTML is invalid include Cnet, linux.com, Slashdot, Google, two of the most prestigious Universities in the UK (Imperial College and Oxford - Cambridge's is good) and several of the best Universities in the USA (Yale, Princeton and Harvard - MIT is good)

Here are some of the good guys:

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to find websites that do validate! Hence...

Conclusion

Most Websites Suck

Update

Since I originally wrote this, some of the pages that did validate (like MIT) are no longer valid HTML. Also, the HTML Writer's Guild site is now valid HTML!

Another change is that I now use XHTML 1.1 -- not HTML 4.01.