MAMA Says: Only Four Percent of Websites Compliant

By Greg McNevin

October 17, 2008: According to new data released by the maker of the popular web browser Opera, a mere four percent of websites are standards compliant.

In order to study compliance to web standards, Opera has put together a Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA) which crawls the internet indexing script data from upwards of 3.5 million web pages.

While ongoing, early results from the study show that compliance to web standards is woefully low at just over four percent, and further to this it also found that sites displaying compliance badges were themselves only actually compliant 50 percent of the time.

The study also turned up some surprising results when it came to editing tools versus validation rates, with pages edited by Apple's iWeb scoring validations an impressive 81 percent of the time, and Adobe’s Dreamweaver limping to have just over three percent of its pages validated.

Apache was found to be far and away the most popular web server used, while Flash was also found to be a popular web technology, found on between 25 percent (Denmark) and 67 percent (China) of all websites.

“The Web is fragmented, complex and always evolving. MAMA's vast database provides us with detailed information about how Web technologies are used,” writes Snorre Grimsby, Opera’s vice president of quality assurance, in a statement. “This is key in our efforts to test and ensure high-quality compatibility, stability, and performance of our products, and we want to share it with our peers, so they can benefit from it, too.”

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