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Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Google ignores web standards

The index page of the blog is now XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant.

It would be CSS2 compliant as well, except for the CSS added by blogger to get that blogger bar to appear on the top. Same thing for comments pages, where some html dynamically added by blogger breaks the standard. This sucks.

An addendum: You would think that at least Google's homepage would contain valid markup, but no. It's not even HTML 4.01 Transitional compliant, leave alone XHTML 1.0 Strict. The page is so minimal, with only a seach box, a couple of lines of text and a few images, and they can't even get that to comply. Pathetic.

This is a perfect example of example of where Postel's law (be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept) breaks down. It is only because browsers are so liberal that no one cares to make their website standards compliant, and this hurts interoperability in the long run (RFC 3117, Section 4.5 Robustness)

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