Mika Tuupola

Finalists of Grand One ‘06 were announced. Small research reveals that in almost every case code is crap.

In the table below are the finalists from four categories: Best B2C service, Best B2B service, Best public/govermental service and Best infodesign. I left out all Flash sites. The validation is made against the frontpage of the url address given in Grand One ‘06 entry page.

Winner of producing the worst code category is Tietotalo with 127 validation errors. The first place is debatable though. Ocaco’s entry uses funky CMS which renders the content using JavaScript. This output containts 142 errors.

What really surprised me is how many companies still do HTML 4.0x Transitional: Tietotalo, Sininen Meteoriitti, Nitro, Ocaco, Grip Studios Interactive. We are not living in the 90’s anymore.

Paperjam uses HTML 4.01 Strict due to W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Among the finalists were only two entries which fully validate. Paperjams Näkövammaisten keskusliitto and Taivas Ego / Adell Taevas joint project Ford Henry.

Other companies having only 10 or less errors are: Ambientia, A4 Media and Aisti Medialab. Most of the errors are unescaped ampersands.

Here are all the validation results:

Company	Site	Content-Type	Errors	Notes
Tietotalo	Lappeenranta.fi	HTML 4.01 Transitional	127
Sininen Meteoriitti	Sosiaaliportti.fi	HTML 4.01 Transitional	121
Nitro	JCDecaux.fi	HTML 4.0 Transitional	90
Nitro	Nordic ID.com	HTML 4.01 Transitional	64
Satama Interactive	Valo.	XHTML 1.0 Transitional	58
Satama Interactive	YTV	XHTML 1.0 Transitional	51
Valve	K�rkimedia	XHTML 1.0 Transitional	44
A4 Media	Yritystele.fi	XHTML 1.0 Transitional	39
Ocaco	Also Starring	HTML 4.01 Transitional	28	When validating the actual JavaScript generated html the error count is 142
Grip Studios Interactive, Kide Concepts	Monta kertaa kaupunkiin	HTML 4.01 Transitional	28
Nitro	Hubihubi	HTML 4.01 Transitional	22
Ambientia	Tiedoteperhe, Maa- ja metsätalousministeriö	XHTML 1.0 Transitional	10	Mostly unencoded ampersands
Taivas Ego, Taivas Design	Igglo	XHTML 1.0 Strict	9	Mostly unencoded ampersands
A4 Media	Zoice – Se parempi radio!	XHTML 1.0 Transitional	6	Mostly from statistics tags
Aisti Medialab	Pingstate.nu	XHTML 1.0 Transitional	2	Mostly unencoded ampersands
Taivas Ego, Adell Taevas	Henry	XHTML 1.0 Transitional	0
Paperjam	Näkövammaisten keskusliitto	HTML 4.01 Strict	0

Related entries: Igglo Beta Out Now!, Ford Henry Cars, The Grand One 2004 – The Finnish New Media Oscars.