Stats O' the Day

Mon Feb 10 17:49:10 EST 1997

Thanks, Thomas, for a great posting quantifying our HTML misdeeds. But 
after a quick perusal of some of the sites that parsed without error, I 
would hazard a guess that things are both worse than you have led us to 
believe and better. 

That is, I was dismayed to discover when I was going through some of the 
pages that parsed without error some of the following in one or more of 
the pages:

* No <HTML></HTML> tag 
* No <HEAD></HEAD> tag
* No <BODY></BODY> tag
* Empty tags (such as <PRE></PRE>)
* Poor design
* Lack of "ALT" attributes in IMG tags

Obviously there is a limit of what can be discovered by programmatic 
checking (one can only wish for a program capable of determining "poor 
design"). Also, a document can parse just fine but not adhere to good 
coding practices (tags such as HTML, HEAD, etc. are optional, but hey!).

On the other hand, for those of us with pages that didn't make the cut 
for one reason or another, parsing programs can sometimes be ridiculously 
tight on some things while letting you get away with murder (see above) 
with others.

The upshot for me is, I imagine, the same as it is for you. We should all 
strive for good, effective, and standard tagging of our Web documents. 
Anything we can do to achieve that goal is work well done. And your quick 
study of the state of our coding, Thomas, is a good step in the right 
direction. Now we all need to take it to heart and turn an critical eye 
on our pages with http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/REC-html32.html in our hands.
Roy Tennant