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 (Google, YouTube, Akamai) plus those without public-facing components (Google’s “gstatic,” EZVIZ’s “Ezviz7”).

Ducreux found more than half – 2,656 sites – served a home page readable by humans.

Many of the others, such as Google and EZVIZ’s, were just traffic redirection sites, a beacon for a company’s products to call home.

Headless or not, nearly 90 percent of these sites were not serving proper HTML, as specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group).

These standards are important so that different browsers and reading tools can render the requested pages in more or less the same way.

Ducreux tallied a total of 100,305 HTML violations (including the most recent HTML5 specs) across all these sites, plus an additional 18,863 CSS errors.

In other words, 87.2 percent of sites violate web specs in at least one place.

Only 12.8 percent have fully valid HTML.

And only 2.6 percent of all sites are completely clean, returning zero errors and zero best-practice warnings.

More alarming, over a third of sites failed accessibility checks, which to their owners is more of a legal liability (and hence a compliance issue) than an embarrassment, given the potential reach of the 2025 European Accessibility Act. (Here in the U.S., woe be the accessibility-inconsiderate e-commerce site that raises the ire of the National Federation of the Blind.) Accessibility-wise, 20.4 percent of sites are missing alt text on images, which often contain vital information.

Worse, 41.6 percent of pages are missing ARIA labels that identify page regions, potentially leaving screen readers struggling to convey the page's structure.

Here’s an iframe, figure it out.