OpenText Website is unfortunately not built on RedDot OR Vignette (coincidence or do we have to wait for those two to sort out where they stand?)

*I admit: Which is why I decided to work for them now.

The cost/benefit of adopting best practices in design, compliance, and markup is something vendors have to be cautious about. At Percussion, we started with a “everything is pure XML/xHTML” approach back in 1999 and have more or less constantly been forced by market demand to be more lenient.

The reality is the Web is a constantly changing place. The real test of a CMS is not whether it generates good markup, but whether it can generate ANY markup with equal amount of effort. When we redid our corporate Website, we actually put in a few examples of non-compliant stuff just to showcase that it was easy to do too.

I’m going to run all the tests again in a week or two. Interesting to see who else improves.

You also do better than IBM on the deeper pages. They don’t all validate, but have very few errors. The target attribute, for example, isn’t valid with your DOCTYPE.

So, I’d say you’re in the lead at the moment.

(If your intersested in folloing my work ive restarted my blog and are posing some about it. http://swippen.wordpress.com )

The “Nobody said this was a #1 requirement for the site” was meant to be covered by the “Nobody knew it mattered” or “Someone decided it wasn’t important”. The distinction was meant to be ignorance versus a crime of omission.

I agree 100% with everyone else you said. It is very time consuming to analyse all the errors to determine if that are generated by the product, some third party integrated code, or something implementation specific oversight. We often suffer from malformed markup from analytics vendors and others, but we try to send it back! When I set up this blog, the FeedBurner markup for the simple RSS link wasn’t valid.

I think maybe the most important point is that some of them clearly never even checked if it does validate, which shows the wrong kind of attitude. Accessibility really is a massive part of the RFPs that I see, so they should really care about it. I think I’ll run the test again in a few days and see if any have improved.

And here’s hoping no-one does the same tests on the sites I’ve been involved in. I wouldn’t expect any of them to have 100s of errors as most did validate at some point. But I’m concerned not as many would get the all clear as I’d hope.

I do blame the Rich Text Editors for a lot of the errors, but I think they’re improving with the new generations of CMS produts. Quite a few of the vendors we use have just switched or are about to switch their embedded editor. FCK and Tiny are on the list.

As an example, here is a complex design which is properly progressively enhanced. The home page still validates, but errors have crept into the depeer pages. The rich text editor in this case does not enforce ALT tags on images, and inserts paragaph tags into bad places. The next release of this product changes the editor.

Does this mean that it is important for Corporate customers to have valid markup, but not for Enterprise customers ?

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.immediacy.net&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

With Immeiacy as long as the templates validate then you can be 99.9% sure your site will also validate.