Validation statistics from Nikita the Spider
About a year and a half ago I mentioned Nikita the Spider: a bulk validation and link checking tool as a useful quality assurance tool. Well, Nikita the Spider has received a lot of fixes since then and has recently been taken out of beta. It is no longer completely free, but the first 125 pages it crawls will cost you nothing.
But what may be more interesting is what Nikita finds when it crawls a site. Philip Semanchuk, Nikita’s author, has analysed the statistics Nikita collected during March 2008 and walks you through the results in By The Numbers – March 2008. A few highlights:
- The most common validation error is neglecting to specify an
altattribute forimgelements - The second most common error is failing to escape ampersands
- XHTML doctypes are much more common than HTML doctypes
- Over sixty percent of the crawled pages use a transitional doctype
Of course these statistics are only representative of a very small sample of the pages that exist on the web. In addition to that, those pages live on sites that somebody has actually asked Nikita to crawl, so it is likely that they are more aware of web standards than the average website owner/author/developer.
It’s still interesting reading though.
- Previous post: Authentic Jobs API and Affiliates program
Information, sponsorship, and externals
About the author
Roger Johansson is a Swedish web professional specialising in web standards, accessibility, and usability. More about me and this site.
Latest articles
- Validation statistics from Nikita the Spider Comments off
- An analysis of the sites crawled by the bulk validation tool Nikita the Spider during March 2008.
- Authentic Jobs API and Affiliates program Comments off
- The Authentic Jobs job listing service now has a public API and an affiliate program.
- What does Acid3 mean to you and me? Comments off
- Opera and Apple have announced that their web browsers pass the Acid3 Browser Test, but how will that help web designers and developers?
- Designing Web Navigation (Book review) Comments off
- Learn the fundamentals of navigation design and design better navigation systems for large and small sites as well as for web based applications.
- DOMAssistant bundle for TextMate Comments off
- To save keystrokes and speed up development I have created a DOMAssistant bundle for TextMate.
- First impressions of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Comments off
- My impressions after trying out Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for a couple of days.









Sorry, comments are closed for this post.