Jeffrey Zeldman recently took a look at how the top 100 sites as selected by Alexa fared in terms of validation. He found that only 7 validated completely while another 4 were close, with just a couple of errors. Obviously, the battle for web standards goes on. I thought I’d take a look to see how some of the very top sites did beyond validation–using our Dreamweaver extension, Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web Standards Advisor. Cut to the chase results? Everyone’s got room to grow.

I visited each of the following sites and copy/pasted the source of their home pages and a random internal page into Dreamweaver and then ran the Advisor. Here’s a bit of what I found:
Google – Fared pretty well, until the final report noted that they’re still using <font> and <center> tags. Really?
Yahoo – Again with the <font> tags; looks like old habits are hard to break. On a more modern property of theirs, Buzz, the font tags were gone, but they seem to have fallen into the trap of labeling their classes with color names, thus making redesigns a bit more hairy than they need to be.
YouTube – A preponderance of classes with color names here, too, as well as overusing classes. Yes, the dreaded classitis!
Interestingly enough, both #4 Facebook and #5 MySpace have more in common than social networking. Both have opted to lead with an h2 tag rather than an h1 tag on their pages. Not a big deal for the top guys, but if you and I made our sites that way, they wouldn’t rank as highly in the search engines. So you’ve got two choices: design your sites to be popular as Facebook and MySpace or place your <h1> tags so that they’re hierarchically positioned. Your choice .

All in all, kind of fun to look at their code from the web standards perspective. If anyone is interested, I saved all the reports generated by WSA and can post them later.

Categories: Web Standards