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Invalid mayors

Do any of of Toronto's wannabe mayors believe in Web standards?

Inspired by MikeyC’s comments during the Ontario provincial election, I decided to check the Web sites belonging to Toronto’s mayoralty candidates to see how many, if any, validated. Half of the forty-four candidates had at least one site listed with the city.

None validated.

Longshots best

Minor errors are understandable, and can easily happen, but that wasn’t the problem with the vast majority.

On the whole, the “fringe” candidates fared the best with most having fewer errors than four of the five top candidates (the exception amongst the main contenders was John Tory’s site with only 28 errors). The candidate site that came closest to validating was Barry Pletch. His site had only two minor errors.

Sixty percent of the top candidates didn’t declare a character encoding (77 percent of fringe sites did). Only eight of the 22 sites declared a DOCTYPE (60 percent of the top candidates didn’t; 65 percent of the fringe sites didn’t either).

By the numbers

The following list of candidates (and their respective Web sites) was based on the information available today on the City of Toronto’s site. The validation results are based on tests conducted today, as well, using the W3C’s MarkUp Validation Service. In the table, the main candidates are listed first; the others follow. If there was no DOCTYPE declared, HTML 4.01 Transitional was used; if no character encoding was declared, ISO 8859-1 was used.
CandidateDOCTYPECharacter EncodingErrors
  1. Tom Jakobek’s site uses an XHTML DOCTYPE but is marked-up in HTML. If switched to HTML 4.01 Transitional, it would only have 28 errors. Back to Jakobek’s information.
  2. The errors on John Nunziata’s site seem to be exclusively because of CMS-specific mark-up. Back to Nunziata’s information.
  3. Don Andrew’s site is framed and the results represent the main site (the frameset page didn’t validate either). Back to Andrew’s information.
  4. Mehmet Yagiz’ site uses the HTML 2.0 DOCTYPE. If switched to HTML 4.01 Transitional, it would only have 134 errors. Back to Yagiz’s information.
Tom Jakobek Yes1 No 118
Barbara Hall No No 88
David Miller No Yes 79
John Nunziata Yes Yes 522
John Tory No No 28
Don Andrews3 No Yes 36
Gary Benner No No 24
Michael Brausewetter Bad hostname
Jaime Castillo No Yes 44
Gerald Derome: Site 1/Site 2/Site 3 No/No/No Yes/Yes/No 85/17/14
Aleksandar Glisic No No 61
Mitch Gold No Yes 8
John Jahshan No Yes 47
Paul Lewin No Yes 32
Duri Naimji Yes Yes 44
Patricia O’Beirne Yes Yes 67
Fen Peters Yes Yes 9
Barry Pletch Yes Yes 2
Hashmat Safi No No 38
Luis Silva No Yes 23
Simon Shaw Yes Yes 9
Mehmet Yagiz Yes4 Yes 217

Despite the lack of support for Web standards, the man who should be Toronto’s next mayor—David Miller—will still get my vote on election day.

If you are part of a campaign, and do get your site to validate, please let me know.