Processing .....please wait.. 
The article has been forwarded.... 
News >> Technology >>
Only 4.13 percent of the web comply with standards
By siliconindia
|
Saturday, 18 October 2008, 01:48 IST
Bangalore: Only 4.13 percent of the websites comply with the standards of Internet, says early results of an ongoing study by browser maker Opera. More shocking is that only 50 percent of sites that display a badge touting validation are actually valid. In order to conduct the study, the company created Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA), a tool that indexes the markup and scripting data from approximately 3.5 million web pages, reports arstechnica.com.
The study suggests that this data could indicate many sites which are initially designed with valid HTML later cease to be valid as changes are made and new content is added.
Opera plans to take the project to the next level by building a search engine on top of the indexed data so that web designers, browser implementers, and standards experts can easily obtain information about real-world usage of web technologies.
The data provides some statistics about the use of specific HTML elements. Among the pages analyzed by MAMA, the most popular HTML tags were HEAD, TITLE, HTML, BODY, A, META, IMG, AND TABLE. The list of least popular tags includes VAR, DEL, AND BDO.
The study also found that Adobe Flash is used on roughly 35 percent of all web sites. Flash is most popular in China, where it was found on 67 percent of the web sites analyzed by MAMA, and it was least popular in Denmark, where it is used on 25 percent of web sites. The XMLHttpRequest scripting mechanism, one of the cornerstones of Ajax, is used on roughly 3.2 percent of the indexed web sites. It is most popular in Norway, where it was found on 10 percent of pages.
The study found that cascading stylesheets (CSS) are very widely used, and appear inline or referenced on 80 percent of the sites indexed by MAMA. The most popular CSS properties relate to color and fonts. JavaScript is also extremely common and is found on 75 percent of indexed web sites.
When Opera analyzed page meta tags to see if there were any correlations between editing tools and validation rates, Apple's iWeb delivered the highest volume of valid pages - the study shows that 81 percent of pages created with iWeb were valid. By comparison, only 3.4 percent of pages created with Adobe Dreamweaver were valid.
As these are initial results of the study, its true value has yet to be fully unlocked.
"The Web is fragmented, complex and always evolving. MAMA's database provides us with detailed information about how Web technologies are used," said Opera vice president of quality assurance, Snorre M. Grimsby, in a statement.