As part of a much larger effort to identify validation trends, in January 2008 I validated URLs from Amazon's Alexa Global Top 500 (January 2008 snapshot). In a recent discussion thread on the W3C's Validator mailing list, I brought up some of the results of this process.

A request was floated to make the full results of validating the Alexa Global Top 500 available for examination, so here they are.

I ended up successfully validating 487 of the URLs from the Top 500 list as part of this wider validation study covering millions of URLs. This Alexa list has some quirks due to its global coverage - the most prominent being that regional variants of some of the most popular sites are heavily (over)represented. 61 of Alexa's Global Top 500 are all Google regional variants!

The results overview covers the usual details that the validator produces: the character set used to validate, the Doctype FPI, the number of warnings, general errors and fatal errors, along with pass/fail validation judgment. The ultra-brief version of these results is: 32 of the 487 URLs passed validation (6.57%).
Talk to Me ipod The Man from Earth divx The Burning Plain download

Saw full


Role Models hd For those wishing to dig even deeper, a full list of the error types and error counts for each type is also available for every one of these URLs.

Detailed Error Results Pages: 1
Cats & Dogs download
, 2, 3, 4, 5