According to a survey recently conducted by the makers of the "Opera" web browser, Only 4.13% of sites globally comply with the code specifications...

Some sites which display badges claiming they pass validation, When clicked, In fact, don't.

None of my sites pass validation for one reason.. They all either xhtml 1.0 transitional or xhtml 1.1 Yet there are the odd snippet of code which isn't compliant...

A company home page, http://i-conica.co.uk passes with CSS 2.1 and displays the badge to prove it, yet it would pass for XHTML1.1 too, if it wasn't for the search boxes which use some slightly less than standard javascript in their code...

The idea of these standards is to ensure that sites look the same in all browsers, Yet sites which do look the same in all browsers, may still not pass the standards checks.

Although it is big news, I'm not that concerned about it.  :-/

There's a reason for that. They make the site, validate it, it passes, then they put the badge on.
(anyone can put the badge on, it's not 'awarded') They then make some changes to the site later on. Those changes make the validation fail. Same reason I gave up validating this forum and other sites long ago... It doubles the amount of time working on the site and for very very little gain...

i pretty much only keep that thing on my main page, which is an incredibly simplistic listing of links.  it rarely changes, and i know it will validate every time because there's nothing fancy there!

plus, i'm using the looser 4.01 transitional standard.