The "race to the bottom" is a
familiar phenomenon that occurs when multiple standards compete for acceptance.
In this environment, the most lenient standard usually attracts the greatest
support (acceptance, usage, and so on), leading to a competition among
standards to be less stringent. This also tends to drive competing standards
toward the minimum possible level of quality. One key prerequisite for a race
to the bottom is an unregulated market because regulators mandate a minimum
acceptable quality for standards and sanction those who don't
comply.1,2 In examining current HTML standards, we've come to
suspect that a race to the bottom could, in fact, be occurring because so many
competing versions of HTML exist.
At this time, some nine different versions of HTML (including its successor,
XHTML) are supported as W3C standards, with the most up-to-date being XHTML
1.1. Although some versions are very old and lack some of the newer versions'
capabilities, others are reasonably contemporaneous. In particular, HTML 4.01
and XHTML 1.0 both have "transitional" and "strict" versions.
Clearly, the W3C's intent is to provide a pathway to move from HTML 4.01 to
XHTML 1.1, and the transitional versions are steps on that path. It also aims
to develop XHTML standards that support device independence (everything from
desktops to cell phones), accessibility, and internationalization. As part of
this effort, HTML 4.01's presentational elements (used to adjust the appearance
of a page for older browsers that don't support style sheets) are eliminated in
XHTML 1.1.
Our concern is that Web site designers might decline to follow the newer
versions' more stringent formatting requirements and will instead keep using
transitional versions. To determine if this is likely, we surveyed the top
100,000 most popular Web sites to discover what versions of HTML are in
widespread use.
