Almost nobody pays attention to web standards anymore

Are web coders losing their respect for standards? A recent review of the world’s largest sites suggests so. ValidateHTML, a project by independent French developer Théo Ducreux, examined the contents of the 5,000 most widely used web domains, as estimated by the Tranco research project. They include the usual suspects ( …

[Ishura]

This very article has 25 errors and 6 warnings :)

[stiine]

They have a corrections button, or is that one of the failures?

[alain williams]

To see them use the W3 validator.

[VoiceOfTruth]

The W3C's own web site has a few warnings and a loads of 'infos' about trailing slashes.

[DrewPH]

*shrug*

The sites I build are largely standards-compliant. I do my best to build for accessibility.

But I can't influence anyone else so worrying about this isn't something that would be worth the oxygen expended.

[werdsmith]

Re: *shrug*

I don't know what we are supposed to do if the problems are built into React, Vue, Angular, Svelte components.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: *shrug*

Demand better.

If you're just accepting faults then you're not secure, not predictable, and likely not all that performant. Don't do that yourself, and don't accept that from suppliers.

[DrewPH]

Re: *shrug*

So don't use shitty frameworks.

[Homo.Sapien.Floridanus]

Dead Internet Theory

Captchas in 10 years..

Browser prompt: Please look into the camera and answer the following question:

“You walk in a desert sand.A tortoise crawls towards you. You flip it on its back. It bakes in the sun…You are not helping it, why is that?”

[Jimjam3]

Re: Dead Internet Theory

‘I know what a turtle is….’

Crumbs, why are those in power copying the predictions from Sci-fi?

Can’t they tell those stories were warnings.

As for standards compliance that’s been slipping down the drain for all areas of society.

University tutors

House buildings

Advertising…. Etc etc.

[ibmalone]

Re: Dead Internet Theory

Sadly I upvoted before the implications of "university tutors" hit home and it's not possible to simply remove an upvote...

[HandlesMessiah]

Re: Dead Internet Theory

For those of us not picking up on the implications, can you elaborate? Unless it's going to open up a can of culture war worms that I'm currently blissfully unaware of.

[RegGuy1]

Re: Dead Internet Theory

Look up Jason Arday. On the other hand, if you wish to remain blissfully unaware of this tragedy -- recommended -- then don't.

[Spazturtle]

Re: Dead Internet Theory

It's only a tragedy in the classical Greek meaning of the word where a person's downfall is caused by their own personal flaws.

Guy was a fraud who got exposed and couldn't take the shame. There is nothing wrong with calling people out for their lies and deceit.

[ibmalone]

Re: Dead Internet Theory

When that calling out and the subsequent pile-on originate because of, and are amplified by (with tragic consequences), the ethnicity of the person in question then perhaps, yes there may be something wrong with it.

[tiggity]

Re: Dead Internet Theory

@ibmalone

Although not tragic consequences, there was recent similar "pile on" (or as may be more reasonably described sustained media reporting that went on for several days) with the author of "The Salt Path" in the UK - white, middle aged & female so no "racism" element there. Though it was a similar theme someone profiting from lies (in that case a purportedly autobiographical book that had lots of untruths). I think the media obviously likes stories about grifters making decent money by lies (unless its the powerful e.g. the ultra wealthy, politicians etc. they seem to go in far less hard on them, they like their targets to have ardently made money but not be part of the incestuous "in groups" many in the media like to ingratiate themselves with).

I would suggest one reason for high press coverage was that Arday got his lawyers onto the Times Higher Education to spike the original investigative story (THE basked down not due to lack of evidence but with the hassle of time & costs fighting the case) & later Arday complained to the Met Police about the THE reporter claiming he was being harassed. So I think there was an aspect of many in the media rallying round / galvanized to to amplify the story as journalists don't respond well to attacks on their colleagues (different outlets but same industry)

[rg287]

Re: Dead Internet Theory

Do you know the name William O’Reilly?

No?

Don who plagiarised his students. And when he was discovered, issued legal threats against the student paper who were calling for a more robust response to his misconduct.

But because his face fits, the media didn’t give a toss.

Arday was most likely a bit of a chancer - though LJM stand by his PhD. But a FoI was made to Cambridge the day he was appointed demanding his credentials. Whilst he had various critics, the most vocal was a chap who had to move back to America after he was (correctly) “cancelled” at Cambridge for saying that if Britain was truly a meritocracy then there would be no black people in public life outside sports and acting. He literally held - in public - that people of colour are the intellectual inferiors of white people. Indefensible.

The Heritage Foundation saw fit to gun for Arday FFS. They have literally no business this side of the Atlantic, never mind commentating on Cambridge professorships.

So maybe Arday was a chancer. He wouldn’t be the first. Questions were raised about the CV of our last Chancellor. Somehow the media circus about a senior member of Government was less frenzied than one about the qualifications of a sociology professor….

Ultimately it was an internal academic issue for Cambridge. The entire media circus is driven by racism and white supremacy. Not always consciously, some of it is just piling on the bandwagon. People deeply underestimate the level to which far-right US-based interests are influencing public discourse through the strategic blowing up of matters like this out of all proportion as wedge issues. It’s a real threat to our democracy and needs to be more carefully scrutinised.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Dead Internet Theory

ibmalone,

If you accidentally vote on a post, you are now committed to voting. However, the type of vote you give, is still an option. You can't got back to no vote, but if you've accidentally downvoted someone, you can turn that frown upside down by upvoting them, and it'll change your vote for you. Or you can go to the grumpy side of the force, and turn an up into a down, if you so choose.

[Sam Lowry]

Re: Dead Internet Theory

Oh, that was very very good!

[xc8]

Re: Dead Internet Theory

s/tortoise/web developer/

[ecofeco]

And?

Great. Those of us who were building website in the 1990s could have told you this. It's all shit piled on top of more shit.

But will it ever be fixed? Oh course fucking not.

[BasicReality]

Re: And?

Fixing it is a job for the AI agents.

[Dan 55]

Re: And?

No, they can't even work out their own XML which allegedly separates user prompts, "reasoning" steps, and answers so they've got no chance with HTML.

[tekHedd]

Maybe it's a mistake

Seeing the headline, my first thought was that it is just an article from 15-20 years ago that got accidentally reactivated.

Screen readers? Heck a generic mouse-keyboard full-vision person has to experiment with each new site to figure out how to navigate the most basic things. It's almost as if two generations of web designers never bothered to read even a short whitepaper on UI design, or even look at another site to consider what would be the "least astonishing" thing.

Stop Innovating.

[steelpillow]

Elegance in motion - not

Let us not forget the cleanly beautiful implementation that is HTML5. It is a "living standard", ever morphing and sliding around as the w3c get hooked on the next bright idea. That browser and site developers should have thrown their hands in the air and left the living standard to go fsck itself is shocking, deeply shocking I tell you. The w3c should unleash an AI on them to keep them all enslaved.

[Pascal Monett]

Don't go giving them ideas.

[steelpillow]

Re: Elegance in motion - not

Actually I lie, the W3C passed it on to the WHATWG a while back. They should have called it the WTF, the Web Technology [F-word to taste].

[sindrelspec]

There are websites that pass validation??

I haven't seen a website that passed a validation check since the late 90s, people seemed to care a lot more back then.

As mentioned in the first comment, even this page doesn't validate: https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theregister.com%2Fdevops%2F2026%2F08%2F17%2Falmost-nobody-pays-attention-to-web-standards-anymore%2F5288782

[Richard 12]

Re: There are websites that pass validation??

There's a lot of perfectly reasonable style choices which that tool calls an error.

For example, it calls it an error to skip heading levels! It's perfectly reasonable to have h2, h4 on a page - especially a dynamic one assembled from parts. You absolutely don't want a footer to change size when the content above changes.

Unfortunately accessibility is far more difficult to check than it should be. There's hardly any free tools.

[find users who cut cat tail]

Re: There are websites that pass validation??

There seem to be perfectly valid sites the tool calls to have errors. I happen to have an old XHTML-strict static web site (how quaint and all that…). XHTML validators are happy with it – but the tools complains the doctype is not html. Probably because it does not even recognise the XHTML doctype declaration.

[sabroni]

Re: There's hardly any free tools.

Inspect page => Accessiblity in Firefox or Edge. Inspect Page => lighthouse (select accessibility).

Can't check Safari, don't have it installed.

Browsers have built in tools that will give you an accessibility report for nothing.

Are you sure you should be commenting on this?

[Richard 12]

Re: There's hardly any free tools.

Those tools are extremely limited, sadly.

[thosrtanner]

Re: There are websites that pass validation??

I find "Warning: The type attribute is unnecessary for JavaScript resources." to be exceedingly annoying. It might be a bit verbose, but it's not incorrect and makes the intent very clear. It's a bit like ruff (python) telling you you've used `range(0, 51)` which IMO is much more explicit about what is expected than `range(51)`. A range has TWO bounds, not 1.

[DrewPH]

Re: There are websites that pass validation??

So style your footer h4 elements differently from your body h4 elements. D'oh!

[MachDiamond]

Re: There are websites that pass validation??

"I haven't seen a website that passed a validation check since the late 90s, people seemed to care a lot more back then."

I'm a greedy F so I want people to find my website navigable no matter what browser they bring. It makes no sense to me to use some function that will only work with one browser and its clones.

Anybody remember Flash and the constant updating it took? All for some useless functionality that would bog down CPU's of the day if somebody wasn't on the bleeding edge. It's as bad as an entrance page that seeks to hide the hamburger to get into the rest of the site (mostly band sites).

[steelpillow]

Re: There are websites that pass validation??

I used to validate all my web pages as XHTML, before recasting as HTML 4.01. Since HTML5, the effort is wasted and I gave up. If only they had not gone too far with that.

[Alumoi]

Re: There are websites that pass validation??

Ahem: https://justfuckingusehtml.com/

[DrewPH]

Re: There are websites that pass validation??

Unfortunately that page is now advising us to use AI slop instead of JavaScript.

[thosrtanner]

Re: There are websites that pass validation??

That has 3 (count them) <script> .... </script> sections in it. that's not 'just html'

[Anonymous Coward]

W3C Gave Up on Amaya

The Amaya web browser/web-page-W3C-standards-conformance-checker developed by the W3C and INRIA, is, per the W3C web page, no longer being developed.

Its most-recent release was in 2012.

[david 12]

MS IE is gone

The function of web standards, like most standards, is to give one set of suppliers a weapon against another set of suppliers. The function of web 'standards' in particular was to label and defeat IE.

Now the IE is gone, there is no persuasive reason why any particular browser should choose to adhere to any particular standard.

[sabroni]

Re: there is no persuasive reason why any browser should choose to adhere to any standard.

What a crock. At roughly 70% of all users Chrome is the new IE. If you want your browser to stand a chance in the market you follow the standards they do.

What is it with people on this thread talking absolute horse shit?

[Pascal Monett]

Why should this thread be any more immune to horseshit than any other ?

[MachDiamond]

A browser for each

I prefer to use LibreWolf, but often have to use FireFox or Safari for some sites. Chrome is a hard NO. I do as much searching using TOR as I can, just in case.

[Pascal Monett]

Re: A browser for each

So I take it you don't have a smartphone ?

[pc-fluesterer.info]

Re: A browser for each

Surfing w/ smartphone is {censored}. Apart from that, there is Fennec.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Re: A browser for each

I run Firefox on my smartphone with Ublock Origin. Every so often, I open Chrome if there's some bastard site that won't render in Firefox, but that's remarkably uncommon.

[MachDiamond]

Re: A browser for each

"So I take it you don't have a smartphone ?"

I don't do web stuff on the phone, I talk to people on it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A browser for each

I'm finding increasing numbers of sites that don't work with Firefox, forcing me to use (spit) Edge.

[Anonymous Coward]

Missing a lot of points

Where to start, HTML and CSS are both formats where the error recovery process is deterministic. Malformed content is guaranteed to parse the same way on all platforms.

It is literally impossible to write a stylesheet or HTML that will crash a (correctly implemented) parser.

So “Browsers are so good at error recovery that nothing forces anyone to fix their code” is true, but browsers are like that because they have implemented the specification, which requires error recovery.

I’m all for writing valid HTML and CSS, but this research is taking what is the greatest success of those formats and recasting it as a failure.

[Filippo]

Re: Missing a lot of points

I think the point is that if a page contains an error, but the error recovery makes it render correctly, but it breaks accessibility, then the error recovery was only partially successful at restoring functionality. If this is all done according to the spec, that only means that the spec was flawed. If it is impossible to craft an error recovery system that restores 100% of functionality, that's okay, but it ought to clearly report this, rather than saying nothing and then failing on corner cases.

There's also a good argument to be made that having error recovery in HTML was never a good idea, deterministic or not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Missing a lot of points

OK, so you remove error recovery from HTML. What, exactly, are you suggesting that the user should do if a web-page opened up with an error dialog "Malformed input at line X"? Please share the good argument that shows how this helps the web-platform - and when I say "help" I'm talking not of the 100,000 developers that write HTML, but the 1,000,000,000 users that consume it.

"I think the point is that if a page contains an error, but the error recovery makes it render correctly, but it breaks accessibility, then the error recovery was only partially successful at restoring functionality." - with respect, I don't think that was the point being made.

The requirement for semantically correct tags is part of WCAG, but not every website hits that requirement. I'm a massive advocate for accessibility in general (I'm one of the contributing authors to the PDF/UA spec), but there will always be HTML pages designed for accessibilty, and it's a hard requirement that those pages are semantically correct tags. For those that aren't, it's not because of the error recovery, it's because no effort has been made by the author to make them accessible.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Missing a lot of points

Ugh, that last paragraph was more garbled than I wanted. Let me rephrase:

Accessibility comes from author intent, always. If you just belt out a page that looks OK and walk away, it's guaranteed to not be accessible. If you want to deliver accessibility you have to think about choosing the semantically correct tags, you have to think about table heading scopes, you have to think how the site navigation works and how the content is structured (the go-to feature everyone uses when they talk about accessibilty, "alt text on images", is ironically perhaps the least important - AI image auto-categorization is already quite effective here). Content only available on rollovers, dynamically loading content, text presented as images, charts without the same information presented in text etc - these are all the enemies of accessibility.

If you think of all those things and implement to the rules of WCAG then you have an accessible website, and (because you've used the right tags) a semantically correct one too. No need for error correction.

If you don't do those things, well, then your site is inaccessible. Whether it's also filled with parse errors is immaterial.

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Missing a lot of points

"I'm talking not of the 100,000 developers that write HTML, but the 1,000,000,000 users that consume it."

Do any of the 100,000 actually ever look at their own pages? If so, a browser that said "no" would be extremely useful, in the same way that almost any other "developer" finds it useful that their compiler emits syntax errors rather than just quietly making up shit in the object code.

[uncredited]

Re: Missing a lot of points

This is exactly why I used Opera back in the days of Presto, it was very unforgiving so you knew if it worked on Opera it was almost guaranteed to work on other browsers.

[Filippo]

Re: Missing a lot of points

>OK, so you remove error recovery from HTML. What, exactly, are you suggesting that the user should do if a web-page opened up with an error dialog "Malformed input at line X"? Please share the good argument that shows how this helps the web-platform - and when I say "help" I'm talking not of the 100,000 developers that write HTML, but the 1,000,000,000 users that consume it.

The user would never see such a page, because the developer would never have been able to put it in production. It's the fail-fast principle. When you write C++, you can't randomly forget a semicolon, and so you don't. Same thing.

Of course, we can't remove error recovery now that there are billions of malformed pages out there. That wasn't what I was talking about.

[alain williams]

Re: Missing a lot of points

Where to start, HTML and CSS are both formats where the error recovery process is deterministic. Malformed content is guaranteed to parse the same way on all platforms.

If I drive my car and crash I am guaranteed that an ambulance will arrive and take the wounded to hospital. So why should I bother to drive in a way that does not need recovery ?

[Dan 55]

Re: Missing a lot of points

Malformed content is guaranteed to parse the same way on all platforms.

Error recovery unspecified by the W3C, each browser can try and recover in its own way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Missing a lot of points

No that's simply not true: error handling specifications for for CSS and HTML. Note the text "the error handling for parse errors is well-defined". There are many tests within the Web Platform Tests that take invalid input and verify the document object model is as expected. I have written parsers for CSS and worked very closely with the HTML parsers, I am familiar with this to a level of detail that pains me to think about.

[Dan 55]

Re: Missing a lot of points

Leaving DOM, JS, Web APIs, the security model, storage APIs, WebGL...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Missing a lot of points

None of which were even mentioned in the article we are both commenting on. Let’s keep it in scope shall we?

Look, I get that not every browser implements everything, and that there are bugs in what is implemented. But hyperbole helps no-one.

[Kurgan]

Errors and warnings? Who cares

As a sysadmin I happen to work with web servers. The so called web developers have only one acceptance parameter: "it looks good on my pc (sorry, on my mac)". Everything else they just disregard. Be them standards, efficiency, security, or not having 10.000 errors a minute in Apache error log. Once a site "looks good" it's done. Bugged on the inside? Uses 10.000 useless plugins? Cannot be updated? Undocumented edits to some packaged file so an update breaks the CMS completely? Slow as hell? Uses 20 GB RAM to show a simple form? People without my mac cannot see it properly? Who cares.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Errors and warnings? Who cares

Your lone downvoter as of writing would seem likely to be one of your, um, "colleagues"....

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Errors and warnings? Who cares

Would they feel the same way if they didn't get paid?

Probably not. As others have pointed out, it is utterly trivial to find many of these errors prior to going live on the site, so the blame presumably rests with the people paying for this crud.

[RockBurner]

Re: Errors and warnings? Who cares

As a web dev, I would like to think that I do care about such issues.

However, having been in the business for 25+ years, and seen the amount of caring that comes from those who pay the salaries, and the amount of care from newer web-devs, I can't help but agree with you.

Quality of output is definitely coming a long way last to quality. I guess Lenin had a point*.

* (referring to the comment that "Quantity has a quality all it's own" in case you wondered what I was wittering about)

[Kurgan]

Re: Errors and warnings? Who cares

seen the amount of caring that comes from those who pay the salaries

You are absolutely right about this. Seeing what you are asked to do, and the budget you are allocated, I can understand why you do it very poorly.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Perhaps a dose of minimalism ?

A minimal subset of existing html and css standards that can produce most reasonable informational content on static pages might not be a bad thing.

The cesspit of the contemporary internet is so advertising and gracking infected that even with blockers and dns filtering any informational content is visually fragemented to the point of unreadibility. How people using screen readers manage is beyond me.

In many cases even Markdown pages are a massive improvement over the noxious html&c

[Persona]

Nostalgia

I look back to those days of old when every website was tested and worked on my browser.

IE6 anyone?

;-)

[DJV]

Re: IE6 anyone?

You'd better watch out you don't get reported for obscene language!

[Persona]

Re: IE6 anyone?

Too soon?

[ChoHag]

Re: Nostalgia

This comment best viewed in Netscape Navigator on a 1024x768 screen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nostalgia

The good old times when I could install both IE and Netscape on HP-UX.

[Anonymous Coward]

Robustness principle / Postel's law

Remember "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept"?

This is what "be liberal in what you accept" gets you.

[seven of five]

Re: Robustness principle / Postel's law

Given its age, a 7.62x53R is conservative, isn't it? And its quite universally (liberally) accepted... Now I just have to wait here for the next web designer.

[Sproggit]

No Downside...

To give you a bit of an extreme example, at a societal level we apply punishments to people who fail to adhere to social norms through the use of crime and punishment.

For a bit of context, our social contracts - the concept of law, crime and punishment - can be seen as far back as 2100-2050 BCE, in ancient Mesopotamia, inscribed in Cuneform on clay tablets in what is known as the "Code of Ur-Nammu.

Today we have a social contract between those who publish content and those who access it via HTML-based means.

It's just that the social contract we've built around HTML as a delivery mechanism actively glosses over deviations from those established norms. A quick Google search suggests that in ranked order of popularity, the browsers we're using are:-

Google Chrome - 68.22%

Apple Safari - 16.47%

Microsoft Edge - 5.37%

Mozilla Firefox - 3.34%

Samsung Internet - 2.06%

Opera - 1.88%

Similarly, if we look at the other end of the equation and think about the most widely-used web platforms today, we get:-

WordPress - 43%

Shopify

Wix

Squarespace

Webflow

Drupal

So if we were to apply the 80/20 rule and were able to persuade Google and Apple on the browser side of things and Wordpress/Shopify/Wix/Squarespace on the back end to all begin a gradual migration towards intolerance of mal-formed HTML, it might be possible to persuade web site maintainers and framework developers to follow along.

This is particularly true of very popular web sites that host and run their own platforms - like the big mainstream media companies - BBC, CNN, Fox, etc.

It almost certainly isn't worth "breaking stuff" to get there... but it's in all our interests to have the technology we use adhere to well-defined standards. The cost to national economies from having to endlessly refactor digital content would run to billions... so this isn't merely an academic exercise.

The only way to get this to move significantly in the right direction is to build an unstoppable momentum towards the uniform standard. Once the momentum is there, it becomes harder/less attractive to stop, because any client-side or server-side technology that deviates is basically just cutting themselves off from the ecosystem.

As the old saying goes:-

"When you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow..."

[Pascal Monett]

Re: No Downside...

Not to complain, really, as I agree with your post generally, but you forgot to mention percentages on Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, and Drupal.

And you did not provide citation.

[Sproggit]

Re: No Downside...

That's fair.

Both data sets came via Google Search AI.

The second data set - the percentage distribution across the back end - did not include percentage figures, or I would have included them.

[MachDiamond]

Re: No Downside...

"Both data sets came via Google Search AI."

So, made up, then?

[ChoHag]

Re: No Downside...

> The cost to national economies from having to endlessly refactor digital content would run to billions

What's with this "would"?

[Torben Mogensen]

Force browsers to mark bad HTML

If, say, the EU required browsers used in the EU to make it clearly visible when web pages don't follow the standard, I think the large web providers would quickly fall in.

The browsers don't have to flatly refuse to display the pages, and they can even do all the error correction that they currently do. But on invalid pages they could show everything (text, pictures, videos) in shades of grey rather than colour. Or, even better, shades of purple.

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: Force browsers to mark bad HTML

I think most users would simply install non-EU versions of the browsers, to avoid the hassle.

[frankvw]

This is news????

Sorry, but I don't understand why this would surprise anyone. HTML violations (and worse) have been rampant since before the start of the browser wars. For the past three decades the vast majority of websites has included malformed HTML. It's just been the degree that varies.

And don't even get me started on broken JS that lingers for years, invisible except for the errors that are only visibible on close under-the-bonnet inspection, or on CSS rules that are either broken or rendered inactive and therefore useless other than as an impediment to trouble shooting.

The code making up the average website is often little more than a digital rubbish dump.

[ecofeco]

Re: This is news????

One word: Frontpage

May it rest in hell.

[captain veg]

Re: This is news????

Yes, Frontpage was infamous for sucking in compliant markup and vomiting out tag soup. But so-called "modern" "frameworks" pretty much require you to ignore web standards completely and hope for the best. I'm thinking in particular of Angular, which pushes you strongly towards totally non-standard tag and attribute names, and, of course, React that makes you chuck both markup and styling in to your Typescript code and cross your fingers that the various layers of transpilation will produce something vaguely on nodding terms with the standards.

Both offer a steep learning curve which would be better put to understanding the actual fornicating web platform. We really don't need that crap.

-A.

[trevorde]

Thumbing its nose at 'web standards'

Lynx - ignores images, videos, CSS and Javascript

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

[Anonymous Coward]

Ducreux wrote ... “Nobody writes that by hand.”

He clearly hasn't met many people like me who are utterly baffled by weird restrictions like [can't put style inside div], or the complete inability of CSS to simply put element [foo] beside element [bar] without thirteen levels of indirection and meta-meta-meta-container divs.

[captain veg]

Re: Ducreux wrote ... “Nobody writes that by hand.”

The <body> of a web page should contain marked up content and nothing else. Non-content, like style and javascript, belongs in the <head> section. Better still, put it in separate files and link with directives in the <head> section. I shouldn't need to be telling you this.

There are several ways of placing even block elements next to each other with CSS that don't require any kind of indirection or meta-container divs, whatever they are. Your ignorance is not the fault of the standards.

-A.

[just4this]

Maybe….

Don’t accept standard

Demand excellence.

[powershift]

Article title was clickbait

But I did check out the webiste. It doesn't like cloudflare bot detection, turning bot detection off allowed it to work on my site but I didn't gain anything. I want my click and time back because it isn't true, people love and follow web standards.

[Anonymous Coward]

Standards? Yes, we’ve never heard of them.

Back in my working days I had many an animated discussion defending the concept of web standards.

Usually I was asked “what are they”, “why bother” “who said they are important” And “do they really matter”?

Those in charge simply don’t care.

[Old Used Programmer]

Dubious about the validity of some of the checking...

I checked the site that I hand wrote for my wife entirely too many years ago. Most of the reported "errors" were complaints that I didn't use CSS....which I don't think existed at the time.

[tiggity]

"Are web coders losing their respect for standards?"

More pertinently, what tiny % of web devs ever had any respect for standards?

Too much commercial web frontend coding has employer mandating use of various frameworks, that often produce dubious code.

Only web frontend code I am happy with these days are the pages I write for a few community groups, which are all handcrafted* (& free of JS, obviously).

* As someone who used XML extensively so I'm keen on strict formatting (an upshot of this is some of the HTML self closing tags like br cause me distress as compliant code looks nasty!).