Re: any error-free web pages at all?

Moved to www-archive.

On Mon, 7 Jul 2008, Dan Connolly wrote:
> 
> OK... at the risk of further exposing my ignorance... I'll bite.
> 
> Today's featured article in wikipedia is ~32k and I don't see any 
> errors; the W3C markup service says "This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.0 
> Transitional!" and the firefox error console is blank. 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Route_32

Content-Type is text/html, but the content is XHTML.

The content has all manner of unregistered extension names and values used 
in HTTP headers, <link rel>, and <link type>, but that's not a huge deal.

The CSS contains the still-non-standard value overflow-x at least twice.

For the <script> elements, the type="" doesn't match the Content-Type.

The Content-Type for scripts is not a registered type.

The scripts use all manner of non-standard APIs, including APIs that even 
HTML5 doesn't (yet) define, like "navigator.userAgent".

The scripts assume that createElement() will return XHTML-namespace nodes, 
which isn't the way under current DOM specs define things.

There is usage of the unregistered javascript: scheme. Said usage violates 
the URI specs.

The injectSpinner() function misuses either alt="" or title="" or both.

ts_makeSortable() uses the wrong alt="" for the <img> as far as I can 
tell.

The IPv6 AAAA connectivity testing section in the Wikipedia-specific 
scripts generates a number of <img> elements whose src="" attributes point 
to non-image content (src="").

The page is shock-full of deprecated presentational markup.

The page has several images with alt="" attributes that don't conform to 
WCAG best practices; some just have the value missing altogether (marking 
content images as decorative); others have captions instead of 
replacement text, etc.

The page has multiple empty paragraphs that are not empty for the 
purposes of future scripts filling them in.

The semantics of the page are somewhat dubious (try looking at the page in 
Lynx or with Firefox with styles disabled -- there are iframes where you 
wouldn't expect, newlines where you wouldn't expect, and odd images next 
to big images, which I assume as supposed to be UI parts.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 7 July 2008 23:04:19 UTC