Top Children’s Hospitals: Are Their Home Pages in the Same League?

Every couple of years CHILD Magazine surveys the nation’s children’ hospitals and ranks the top 25. Well, actually they rank the top 10 and then have 15 runners up, but since Seattle Children’s (where I work) came in at #13 this year, I’m going to say they rank the top 25 – any problem with that?

I thought it would be interesting to see whether the home pages (and by implication, the websites) of these esteemed pediatric medical establishments were of a similar caliber in terms of the validity of their code.

I checked each of these sites using the W3C’s validator using three simple criteria – did the page have a valid doctype, were any linked style sheet(s) valid, and how many HTML errors were there on the page.

The Results

CHILD Ranking	Hospital	Doctype?	Valid CSS?	No. of HTML Errors
1	Philadelphia	No	No	32
2	Boston	No	Yes	62
3	Wisconsin	N/A	No style sheet	N/A
4	Texas	No	Yes	40
5	Cleveland	Yes	No	245
6	Atlanta	No	No	48
7	Denver	No	No	35
8	Nashville	No	No	102
9	Pittsburgh	No	No	87
10=	Los Angeles	Yes	No	117
10=	St. Louis	Yes	No	104
12	Kansas City	No	No	64
13	Seattle	Yes	Yes	0
14	U of Michigan CS Mott	N/A	No style sheet	N/A
15	Salt Lake City (Primary Children’s)	Yes	No	109
16	New York-Presbyterian	Yes	Yes	46
17	Schneider Children’s NYC	Yes (incorrect)	Yes	121
18	Indianapolis	No	No	62
19	Washington DC	Yes	Yes	56
20	Columbus	N/A	No	N/A
21	St. Petersburgh	Yes	Yes	39
22	U of Chicago Comer	Yes	No	0
23	Charleston	Yes	No	21
24	Orange County	No	No	74
25	Arkansas	Yes	No	69

N/A = No character encoding; unable to validate page.

Parting Thoughts

I dare say that most of these sites are powered by a CMS, which is a testament to the quality of the code that most content management systems are still producing. However, 10 sites without even a doctype? That’s a pretty basic omission.

I also recognize that some of the errors are produced by unencoded URLs, which can be tricky to avoid, and so for a few sites, the errors are a little overstated. However, there are also plenty of basic HTML coding mistakes such as missing tags and so on.

Some of the CSS errors were rather entertaining too, including made-up elements and some horribly basic mistakes (plus plenty of typos too).

Anyway, kudos to The University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital for having a valid (almost – only one CSS error) site – it just goes to prove that it can be done.