Welcome to Valid Sites

Today is the inauguration of this site. As it develops there will be more sites and tools for helping determine if sites, especially government sites, are being "truthful" about their web documents. Government web pages are supposed to be as accessible as possible, but unfortunately there are often mistakes in the underlying code/HTML of the pages. At the beginning of many web pages is a statement of what version of HTML is being used. As this site will show, many web sites claim to be a certain version of HTML, but are not. While the web pages themselves may be viewable, there are some things that get lost in the mix. For example, because of these errors the information that is shown may be different from the actual data stored in non-human readable formats. This is not only a problem for governments, but we should hold governments to a higher standard than private sites.

Many times the tools that are used to generate web pages are faulty. For this reason, the government should enact better standards for procurement of tools to create web pages. Whether free tools, like Plone which is used for this site, to proprietary and expensive document management tools, there should be no excuse for poor coding. Fortunately, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that maintains the standards for HTML and XML, provides excellent documentation on the standards and even provides an easy to use tool for checking on whether the page is "truthful" or valid. As we move from the age of just push stuff onto the web, to the age of the web as a human readable as well as machine processable/mashupable web pages, creating "truthful" pages and making sure that data is not pushed into human inaccessible areas is paramount.

However, the seeming difficulty of making "valid" pages should not give an excuse to isolate lots of "raw" data that government produces in unfriendly to human to read formats. There is a technology that can take XML and transform it into XHTML automatically.