[uf-discuss] stats on well formed XHTML

[Nick Fitzsimons]

On Wed, January 16, 2008 11:04 pm, ryan wrote:
> On Jan 16, 2008, at 12:41 AM, Kevin Burton wrote:
>
>> Has anyone done any large scale audits of XHTML in the wild to
>> determine the percentage that parse correctly?
>
> Yes, Ian Hickson at Google did a survey of about 1B pages and found
> that over 90% had *well-formedness* errors. I can't find a reference
> off hand, but it maybe buried somewhere in [#webstats].
>

Ian Hickson's study at <http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html> links
to studies by Marko Karppinen (2002)
<http://www.markokarppinen.com/20020222.html> and Evan Goer (2003)
<http://www.goer.org/Journal/2003/04/the_xhtml_100.html> both of which
suggest that anyone expecting to find much well-formed XHTML on the web is
doomed to disappointment.

I can't imagine that things have got any better since :-(

HTH,

Nick.
-- 
Nick Fitzsimons
http://www.nickfitz.co.uk/