Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Soren Johannessen of Denmark undertook the task of surveying how many governmental, national, municipal authorities follow the W3C Standards for HTML/XHTML markup in Denmark. Gathering the list of 2033 sites from an alphabetical listing at the Danish Ministry for Science, Technology and Innovation (online list), Soren began testing the sites from beginning to end, and published results to the web.

The pages were tested and noted for Doctype, version, validity, and errors. Also available is a downloadable spreadsheet of results(420 KB .xsl format – Microsoft Office excel or OpenOffice.org). The data from the survey was collected during January 31th until February 16th 2004

More information about this survey, link to the spreadsheet, and replies by others are highlighted in a thread at the W3C public-evangelist mailing list found at:
Subject: The use of W3C standards in Denmark Part II.

Soren writes in the letter:

Well my main ambition with this survey is to create a debate in Denmark. So politicians begin react. One big problem I also see is that the retailer of CMS never ever tells/educate the buyers, how to set up the HTML/XHTML template for correct W3C standard. Lot’s of people in public sector thinks, well we have bought this expensive CMS then we also assume that everything is fine, but that’s not the case.

Finally, I don’t think the problems above are only a problem in Denmark. I think it’s world wide problem.

Many of us feel this way, too, and are glad to see work like yours and others get noticed. Great job, and we hope that debate begins for you, soon.

An overview of the major findings from this survey available in English at:

The use of W3C standards in Denmark
by Soren Johannessen (2004-03-02)

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