Golden Spiders – Not So Shiny

The shortlist for this year’s Golden Spiders was announced last Friday.
As usual people are none too pleased with the list and I’d be a hypocrite not to agree with them.
Why so much displeasure?
Well you could look at the entry criteria……
Even though the awards are sponsored by large companies you still have to pay to nominate a site. Why do I get the feeling that a lot of quality sites don’t even get entered????
OR
you could look at the shortlist itself…. (which a lot of people have been doing)
Either way the merit of the awards is not appreciated in many industry circles.
Richard and Peter both commented on how most of the shortlisted sites do not pass the W3C validation test (which tests to see if a website’s code is compliant with industry standards). The W3C validator does not care which version of (X)HTML a site is written in, as long as the site’s code complies to the chosen standard.
Richard has since taken his gripes to the next level by doing some further testing of the shortlist. The results make for interesting reading.
Of course previous winners’ sites aren’t even viewable unless you use Internet Explorer….