{"id":40,"date":"2005-10-03T10:40:41","date_gmt":"2005-10-03T10:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/?p=40"},"modified":"2015-04-21T20:26:28","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T18:26:28","slug":"government-web-standards-usage-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.standards-schmandards.com\/2005\/government-web-standards-usage-usa\/","title":{"rendered":"Government web standards usage: USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the first in a series of articles where we look at how government organisations use the W3C recommendations. Using the mass validation tool from a previous article, Validating an entire site<\/a>, we have a look at our first contestant: USA. The result: only 13 of 546 government web sites tested use valid HTML<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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How the test was carried out<\/h2>\n

In a previous article I wrote about how you can script a local installtaion of the W3C validator tool<\/a> using Python. I have since modified the validator to do more checks apart from making sure the HTML is valid. Links to US government web sites were obtained from FirstGov.gov: the U.S. Government’s Official Web Portal<\/a>. Only the first page of the web site was checked. The test was carried out on September 25.<\/p>\n

Test disclaimer<\/h2>\n

Please note that usage of the W3C recommendations is only an indication of accessibility. A site that does not validate may still be more accessible than one that does. I have not tested every site manually and you may find that some of the valid ones have a valid splash page but fail miserably for the rest of the site. If you find errors, please post them below and I will update the table.<\/p>\n

Results<\/h2>\n

The validation result is presented in a table here<\/a>. Out of 546 tested web sites only 13 (2.4%) were using valid HTML. No web site used Dublin Core for meta data<\/a> and the majority of the web sites are using tables for layout. The 13 web sites that did use the W3C recommendations are:<\/p>\n