Authoring Conformance Requirements

2010-03-20T05:15:24Z

The HTML5 validator will produce both errors and warnings. I personally believe that many of the so-called “errors” are at best shoulds and at worst pose no real interoperability problems and are so frequently violated that the message produced only serve to obscure real problems.

To help evaluate this thesis, I’ve analyzed a few sites, categorized each error and warning, and taken a first pass at sorting these messages. Those that I have sorted to the top are ones I’ve thought to be less likely to be intentional and/or more likely to cause interoperation issues. And, therefore, those that appear later tend to be ones that I either find likely to be willful violations, or are unlikely to cause any problems at all.

I want to stress that this ordering was done quickly, and is likely to have many, many errors. I’m presenting it early in the hopes that others would comment on this. Such comments may very well influence further exploration I do in this area.

From Alexa Top 500:

Honorable mentions:

HTML5 notables (and/or organizations I’m associated with):