Saturday, 12th May 2007, 9 Comments »
Validating the 2007 Netguide awards
Another year, another netguide validation test…
A few years ago, James and I, while having a quiet drink in a local bar discussing the web designer news of the day started joking about the Netguide awards and if any of the winners would actually use valid HTML or CSS. Thus the 2004 Netguide Validation test was born, initially no-one passed, not even the Government sites, after the first week the blog finalists bizgirl, IdolBlog and Public Address all fixed their validation problems. I reran the tests for the 2005 winners and only Public Address, Huggies and the Government sites (as have to) passed the validation muster.
This year
This year I’ve rerun the test for the 2007 finalists (not sure what happened to the 2006 awards?). I think overall the results look worse than they are, even though only Public Address passed and most CSS still doesn’t validate (sometimes due to adding in browser specific styles like scroll-bar and -moz-opacity), some of the sites where really close to passing HTML validation. Most errors where due to everyday mistakes, ampersand coding, not closing tags correctly and not specifying the character encoding of a page.
One thing I did notice is the number of sites now using XHTML, but still using tables for layout. I’m looking at you Trade Me. It seems so frustratingly stupid, why go to all the trouble of moving to XHTML and not use it semantically?
Next Year
I may, next year if I have enough time, look at adding in more information and tests on the finalists, such as which doctype the site is using, if they’re using tables for layout and basic accessibility features like labels and correctly marking up tables.
9 Comments to “Validating the 2007 Netguide awards”
[...] I’ve just read through the validation tests that Pete McVicar put the NetGuide 2007 Web wards finalists through. Just one site passed both the valid HTML and CSS tests - Public Address. Pete criticises TradeMe for their use of tables for layout and Rowan responded with his own comments. I commented on Rowan’s site that there are a couple of tables that could be replaced with divs, but that tables should still be used for displaying the listings and search results. [...]
I was interested that you guys didn’t validate the ISP sites. I guess that you are of the opinion that ISP sites aren’t really what the ISP awards are voted on, and you would be right of course.
Having said that, we (at Orcon) worked really hard to develop our new site and make sure that it was valid XHTML. The majority of the site now is, with the major exception being the ‘My Account’ area (it is in the pipeline). I know that some of our competitors are pretty far from validating.
Just thought I would point that out. Great work on getting some of our “best” sites in line.
Duncan Blair
Marketing Manager
Orcon Internet
Hey Duncan, that’s exaclty why I didn’t validate the ISP finalists.
Good on Orcon for suppotring web standards.
Why don’t you validate the winners of the qantas awards too?
I was planning on doing that this weekend, but this test will incorporate some of the feedback I’ve received and some of the other things I’ve wanted to do.
This page doesn’t currently validate…(!)
Result: Failed validation, 2 errors
File: validating-the-2007-netguide-awards.htm
Encoding: utf-8
Doctype: XHTML 1.0 Transitional
Error Line 77 column 7: document type does not allow element “ul” here; assuming missing “li” start-tag.
Yeah I know, it’s the stupid wordpress plugin for related posts. Been planning on fixing it as part of the small tweaks I’ve been making to the site over the past few months (like the stupid HTML comment formatter).
Good one. I had a quick look at a couple of them - can’t wait to see a full table. Will you incorporate a comment on semantic coding and screen reader accessibility?
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