The Code Quality tab follows the standard conventions within Sitemorse for reporting and accessing the data related to these issues. This article is more of a Why Use the Code Quality tab rather than a How To.

The information under the Code Quality tab identifies code which does not comply with the W3C or IETF standards and commonly affect the visual display of your site or slow it down. Internet Explorer (IE) has historically tolerated some of these standards violations. However, IE 7 has become more standards compliant and therefore less tolerant.

New research shows that Microsoft browsers continue to lead overall, with IE 7 showing strong growth over the last six months. However, Microsoft should not be complacent as open source is still gaining momentum with Firefox 2 dominating the alternative browser market.

The research is good news for Microsoft which is riding high on the success of the launch of IE 7 in November 2006. While the older Microsoft browsers continue to lose ground their market share overall remains stable. More than three quarters (77.5 per cent) of all European users are surfing the internet with a version of IE. ADTECH’s research shows that IE 6 still tops the browser rankings with a market share of 45.7%, followed by IE 7 with 31.4% , Firefox 2 with 13.3 % while Opera and Safari making up 2.5% between them.

With IE 7 and, even more so, the alternative browsers are less tolerant of non-compliant HTML code we saw a big rise in Website problems as IE 7 penetration took off and as the alternative browsers stole market share from Microsoft.

With the trend for people to use Mobile devices to access Websites while on the move we will see problems here too. With only our limited use of accessing the web on Mobiles while out of the office we've come across several sites that have problems rendering correctly due to non compliant code.