Chasing perfection: websites that pass all the tests

Have you ever wanted to achieve website perfection?

Ever wanted to get (and maintain) four 100/100 scores in Lighthouse? Make automated accessibility tests like Axe DevTools pass completely? ... Even tame the most verbose and difficult of checkers, the W3C Validator?



I am here to show you how to get there and show you its not as hard as it seems. Even under such rigid constraints, a lot of creativity is possible. In this talk I will demonstrate a handful of sites that are simple and pass tests with flying colors, and also show how they manage to be incredibly useful and communicate information. And best of all, you can make one too!



For fun, we will embrace a practical kind of perfectionism for 20 minutes and accept nothing less than perfect. This talk is intended to be an engaging session showcasing several static websites created with a goal to pass as many quality performance and accessibility and code checker tests as possible that for many working websites might as well be an impossible dream. Despite these constraints, some of these websites have served very effective real world purposes and work well for humans, bots... and even AI Agents. 



An open source starter project, The HTML5 Boilerplate project, is chosen for a convenient starting point for teaching how to make such a website. Important and useful example tests including Lighthouse tests, Yellow Lab Tools, Arc Toolkit and the W3C Validator are introduced and discussed as to their merits and caveats. We may also run some tests on popular websites, just to see how wild the world can be venturing out of this cone of perfection to see how common imperfection always is in the real world.

In this this talk we will question and critique the concept of perfection and the drawbacks of building to strict tests, while getting the joy of seeing some websites which achieve at high levels and learning skills to make our own. What does it mean to make a website where there are no more audits to respond to? Is it the end? 



Ultimately, I will leave you with some knowledge and skill to make your own "perfect website" and leave you completely free to make something different, but knowing a little more about the difference.