John Topley’s Weblog

This one’s a classic. For reasons too dull to go into, I needed to research the UK government’s e-GIF standard and ended up at the UK GovTalk website—setting standards for seamless electronic government. This site is not only very dull but is chock-full of documents about standards, and proudly displays the appropriate badges that proclaim as much. W3C WAI-A WCAG 1.0 (hmm, snappy!) W3C XHTML 1.0 etc.

Being the inquisitive sort I clicked the XHTML 1.0 compliant button to have the site validated against the XHTML 1.0 standard by the W3C. So imagine my surprise when the validation results came back with eighteen errors!

Don’t these people check their own sites or do they think that you can just display the appropriate hallmark without having to do the work that earns the badge? I think that the W3C should be able to detect failed validations that have come via one of their banners and act accordingly i.e. get the banner removed until the site complies. The W3C eat their own dog food, so why can’t the UK government?