An experimental study on validation problems with existing HTML webpages
Shan Chen, Danfeng Hong, Vincent Y. Shen · 2005
In this paper we report the results of an experimental study on the validation problem of existing HTML pages in the World Wide Web. We have found that only about 5% of webpages are "valid" according to the HTML standard. An "invalid" webpage may be rendered differently by different browsers; it may not be machine-processable; it might not be translated into other Web document formats correctly using some of the translation engines available on the Web; etc. Through sampling and analyzing the results, we have identified the most common problems in existing webpages that made them invalid. We hope our discovery can encourage standard bodies, browser developers, authoring tool developers, and webpage designers to work together so that the number of valid webpages continues to grow and the Web can indeed reach its full potential.