Design Oahu

I found out today that my web site did not validate as valid (x)html markup (I had mistakently left out a closing “a” tag). I fixed the issue and am now validating properly. I then started to get curious about how many other bigger websites fail in validation. I went over to the Alexa Global Top Sites list and took notes on how many of the top 50 sites validate. Granted Google dominates a large portion of this list with their sites for specific countries, however I noticed that different errors were presenting themselves on different sites, so I just played along. So, how were the results? Extremely disappointing! Only five out of the top fifty site’s home pages were valid html or valid xhtml (that is just 10%). Sina, Imageshack, and Dailymotion.com were not even able to report how many errors there were to complete the test as some of the characters used were not even found in their specified text encoding. The sites that passed are MSN, Wikipedia, Skyrocket, Yandex, and Craigslist.

1. Yahoo! - Failed validation, 34 Errors
2. Google - Failed validation, 30 Errors
3. YouTube - Failed validation, 78 Errors
4. Windows Live - Failed validation, 64 Errors
5. MSN - Passed validation
6. Myspace - Failed validation, 123 Errors
7. Facebook - Failed validation, 37 Errors
8. Wikipedia - Passed validation
9. Hi5 - Failed validation, 297 Errors
10. Orkut - Failed validation, 16 Errors
11. Rapidshare.com - Failed validation, 122 Errors
12. Blogger.com - Failed validation, 19 Errors
13. Megaupload - Failed validation, 86 Errors
14. Baidu.com - Failed validation, 38 Errors
15. Friendster - Failed validation, 93 Errors
16. Yahoo! Japan - Failed validation, 457 Errors
17. Microsoft - Failed validation, 31 Errors
18. Fotolog.com - Failed validation, 95 Errors
19. QQ.com - Failed validation, 345 Errors
20. Google France - Failed validation, 41 Errors
21. Ebay - Failed validation, 181 Errors
22. @Mail.ru - Failed validation, 525 Errors
23. Google Brazil - Failed validation, 39 Errors
24. Skyrock - Passed validation
25. Sina - Failed validation (Unable to complete test due to character encoding issue)
26. Google Germany - Failed validation, 43 Errors
27. Google Chile - Failed validation, 44 Errors
28. Google UK - Failed validation, 45 Errors
29. Google Spain - Failed validation, 49 Errors
30. Flickr - Failed validation, 30 Errors
31. Seznam - Failed validation, 1 Error
32. Google Poland - Failed validation, 45 Errors
33. Amazon.com - Failed validation, 1588 Errors
34. IMDB - Failed validation, 211 Errors
35. Photobucket - Failed validation, 122 Errors
36. Megarotic.com - Failed validation, 6 Errors
37. Imageshack - Failed validation (Unable to complete test due to character encoding issue)
38. Wretch - Failed validation, 541 Errors
39. Google Mexico - Failed validation, 39 Errors
40. Youporn.com - Failed validation, 4 Errors
41. Yandex - Passed validation, 3 warnings
42. Onet.pl - Failed validation, 302 Errors
43. Dailymotion.com - Failed validation (Unable to complete test due to character encoding issue)
44. Go.com - Failed validation, 172 Errors
45. Universo Online - Failed validation, 1276 Errors
46. Imagevenue.com - Failed validation, 32 Errors
47. BBC - Failed validation, 35 Errors
48. Megavideo.com - Failed validation, 224 Errors
49. Allegro - Failed validation, 61 Errors
50. Craigslist - Passed validation