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The purpose of this paper is to provide an update on previous surveys that have looked at the quality of HTML documents on the worldwide web. Previous surveys have indicated that the quality of HTML documents tends to be quite poor, with most documents containing defects.

To determine the extent of this problem, the paper undertook a large‐scale study of HTML document quality among the most popular web sites (approximately 100,000).

This paper found that the vast majority (over 95 per cent) of web sites did not adhere to the worldwide web consortium standards for HTML.

This study represents a single investigation over a short timeframe. Hence, ideally the study needs to be replicated in the future to help generalise the findings.

Such poor quality may jeopardise the security or usability of a web site, making the site's users vulnerable to malware attacks. This poor level of quality has drastic implications for web usability and security.

This new survey undertook a more extensive examination of popular web sites than previous surveys.