

Top validation errors  - cientifico
http://w3clove.com/charts/errors

======
mbostock
Pie charts are intended to show how one constituent value compares to the
whole. Since these errors are not mutually exclusive (a single page can fail
validation for multiple reasons), and since the top 10 reasons constitute an
arbitrary whole, they should really be using a bar chart.

Um, like this: <http://bl.ocks.org/2941604>

~~~
jaimeiniesta
Thanks Mike, I've updated the charts. It really looks better as a bar chart:

<http://w3clove.com/charts/errors/bar>

------
snorkel
The two most popular are a crock:

* Required attribute alt missing: Most images are decorative, having alt is pointless in most cases. Should be optional.

* & didn't start a character reference: proving this was a bad choice for an escape character to begin with

~~~
olavk
You indicate than an image is purely decorative by providing the attribute
value `alt=""`.

~~~
icebraining
Which provides no more information than no alt attribute at all.

~~~
DanBC
No, it shows the author has thought about alt attributes and has included them
because doing so is standards compliant.

For images that are purely decorative including an empty alt attrib is valid.
People using screen readers (and people with images turned off[1]) don't need
to hear (or read)"SMALL RED BULLET" for all 7 items in the list.

[1] I often have images turned off. I'm using a mobile broadband dongle. My
ISP uses horrible proxies to compress images. I'm in the UK. The IP of the
proxies is 1.2.3.9 through 1.2.3.12 - this is sub-optimal for many obvious
reasons. Bypassing this proxy is trivial, but means I download a lot more
data.

~~~
moreati
I'm guessing a 3G provider other than Three or Vodaphone - said proxy is why I
left T-Mobile. Last I tried you can instruct the proxy not to alter your web
traffic using HTTP cache control headers e.g.
<http://www.lewiz.org/2007/01/hacking-t-mobile-web-proxy.html>

~~~
DanBC
Yes! They re-write webpages to insert a bunch of script, which re-writes all
alt tags to instructions for fetching higher quality images for this or all
images on the page. It is annoying. They also have a psuedo-random
interstitial telling me that I'm over the "fair use" allowance.

The only reason I'm still using them is that they don't charge for MB or GB; I
pay for three months and get "unlimited surfing". They block some stuff after
you hit 1GB, but that's trivially easy to get around. Which I do, since
they've said I get unlimited web use.

------
leejw00t354
This shows how well browsers handle bad HTML.

It always surprises me when I make a mistake in my code and I don't notice it
until I next few the source because the browser has understood what I was
meant to do.

I guess although this is good for the end user it isn't always a great thing
for developers learning HTML if they're able to write bad HTML without ever
knowing they're doing something wrong.

~~~
pyre

      > This shows how well browsers handle bad HTML
    

It's not that hard to handle something like an <img> tag with no alt
attribute.

------
viraptor
I'd be glad if they changed the format of entities to something like &non-
whitespace; suddenly all uses of & on its own becomes legal and is backwards
compatible

~~~
jacobr
Why use character entities at all when serving documents as UTF-8?

~~~
olavk
You need them for < > and &.

------
jaimeiniesta
It's interesting to see the validation for Hacker News:

[http://w3clove.com/sitemaps/check?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycom...](http://w3clove.com/sitemaps/check?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com)

You wouldn't tell there were so many images, would you? Should they have an
"alt" attribute?

~~~
DanBC
They are functional. They need an alt tag. Having [grayarrow.gif] and
[graydown.gif] is sub-optimal.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
While we're at it, we should stop using tables, too.

------
nodesocket
Anybody else think its a little absurd that `alt` on img tags are still
required for valid HTML?

~~~
0x0
It's absolutely ridiculous, especially since you can get away with alt="".

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
No it's not. An empty alt specifies that it's a presentational image. On the
other hand, no alt is unhelpful, as you can't tell if the omission was
intentional, or the developer is just lazy.

~~~
kalleboo
An empty alt can also just mean "I used a tool to generate this and didn't
fill out the alt field" or "I just want this page to validate and still don't
care".

Making the alt tag required won't make lazy developers/content providers any
less lazy, so requiring it actually _weakens_ the signal you're looking for.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
And then if we make it optional, now developers and software don't have to
even consider putting any alt content.

At least requiring one makes them think about it. And tools can put in
"image".

------
andrewcooke
what on earth is "mibenumid" (last entry)? googling for it shows that it's a
popular name for a url query param, but i'm not sure how that's relevant
(perhaps the error comes from the "&" separator in a URL not being escaped?).
is it used by some popular middleware? the pages google is throwing up seem to
be asp...

~~~
x1
<http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets>

>The MIBenum value is a unique value for use in MIBs to identify coded
character sets.

>The value space for MIBenum values has been divided into three regions. The
first region (3-999) consists of coded character sets that have been
standardized by some standard setting organization. This region is intended
for standards that do not have subset implementations. The second region
(1000-1999) is for the Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 coded character sets together
with a specification of a (set of) sub-repertoires that may occur. The third
region (>1999) is intended for vendor specific coded character sets.

However that specific error (reference to entity "x" for which no system
identifier could be generated) has this message:

>This is usually a cascading error caused by a an undefined entity reference
or use of an unencoded ampersand (&) in an URL or body text. See the previous
message for further details.

I notice this on one website that is using MIBEnumID:

<span

    
    
      class="st_facebook_large"  
    
      displaytext="Facebook"     
    
      st_url='http://www.hardrock.com/locations/cafes3/events.aspx?locationid=108&MIBenumID  
      

Could it be that it is just throwing this error because of the unencoded
ampersand? And that since it is part of some MS/ASP.net setup it is
everywhere?

------
jaimeiniesta
yeah I too agree that the "alt" attribute should not be considered an error.
Maybe just a warning.

There's a separate chart for the top 100 warnings:

<http://w3clove.com/charts/warnings>

------
ehutch79
uh, forge tthe alt, should the no closing img tag be on the list? or not
closing br? i've never used those, ever. they make no sense.

