Markup validation of http://www.google.com • Hacker News Board

Re: Markup validation of http://www.google.com

#11

Post by ceejayoz » Thu, Nov 04, 2010, 5:16 PM UTC

Virtually all of those are "use CSS instead" or "use & instead of &".

External CSS on Google's home page would mean billions of extra HTTP requests. Adding the amp; would mean terabytes of data transfer to fix something that works just fine in all browsers.

Re: Markup validation of http://www.google.com

#12

Post by noguchi » Thu, Nov 04, 2010, 5:18 PM UTC

So if it's OK for Google to skip on standards, it's OK for the rest of us too. right?

Re: Markup validation of http://www.google.com

#13

Post by thesteg » Thu, Nov 04, 2010, 5:19 PM UTC

Ehm, they are either using obsolete tags or failed escaped the & sign. Nothing to be worried about.

Re: Markup validation of http://www.google.com

#14

Post by DannyCooper » Thu, Nov 04, 2010, 5:22 PM UTC

noguchi wrote: post #12

So if it's OK for Google to skip on standards, it's OK for the rest of us too. right?

It's a conscious business decision they have made, you can do whatever you want to with your business. As long as it looks right in all browser/os configurations I don't think your customers will mind.

Re: Markup validation of http://www.google.com

#15

Post by rimantas » Thu, Nov 04, 2010, 5:22 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #6

qjz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gee, with so many brilliant people working there, I would have expected better from Google.

[deleted]

Google might have their reasons to ignore the standards—but I very much doubt of their validity. E.g. all those bgcolor=#ffffff text=#000000 link=#0000cc vlink=#551a8b alink=#ff0000 attributes onbody element. You may claim that these are intended to support the older browsers which have no CSS support. Well, dissable CSS and take a look at google.com to see how much water does this argument hold.

And even if there are valid reasons for invalid markup, there is no reason to have DOCTYPE of the actuall standard if you are not going to follow it.

Re: Markup validation of http://www.google.com

#16

Post by qjz » Thu, Nov 04, 2010, 5:29 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #6

qjz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gee, with so many brilliant people working there, I would have expected better from Google.

[deleted]

Google's pages don't validate. Nobody's claiming there isn't a reason for it. Naturally, one would expect Google to adhere to the standards. As you point out yourself, they're smart enough to understand them. This is old news. Why is it relevant today? Because Google just released mod_pagespeed (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865249), an Apache module that speeds up pages by rewriting them, using filters based on optimizations developed by Google over the years. If you're a web developer that works under the requirement that all pages are valid HTML, it's important to consider the source before jumping on the mod_pagespeed bandwagon.

Re: Markup validation of http://www.google.com

#17

Post by symkat » Thu, Nov 04, 2010, 5:34 PM UTC

Whenever I see things along this line, I think back to something a mentor and close friend of mine has said, repeatedly:

  You should never do this.  Unless you have a really good reason.

Do not think for one second someone from Google is going to see this and go, "Oh darn it, I knew I was supposed to do something before google went live."

Re: Markup validation of http://www.google.com

#18

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 04, 2010, 5:35 PM UTC

alnayyir wrote: post #3

nolane wrote: post #2

I would have expected better from google.

You're unintentionally hilarious. You know nothing about Google's technological challenges nor the decisions behind the various circumstances where they chose to ignore the standard. I guarantee you that there are thousands of people working at Google who are: 1. Smarter than you 2. Know more about web standards than you Seriously, get the hell out of here.

[deleted]

Re: Markup validation of http://www.google.com

#19

Post by rimantas » Thu, Nov 04, 2010, 5:36 PM UTC

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #8

Google is well aware and proud of that fact. They cut their bandwidth in half by not validating. I was playing with jQuery in the dev console in Chrome yesterday on the Google homepage and realized that I was writing valid jQuery, but that $("body") simply didn't exist.

  They cut their bandwidth in half by not validating.

Care to elaborate on this bullshit about cutting bandwidth in half? I just want to remind you that quoting attributes and leaving out some tags is perfectly valid in HTML5 and HTML4.01. Even in strict.

Converting their markup to the valid one would not be difficult, and they could even save some bandwidth. For example: drop those stupid attributes for body tag. drop - these tags are optional. Why do you waste precious bandwidth with ? Your DOCTYPE claims that page is marked up in HTML5 so use it: . Drop thet method=GET from your form: it's default. Alias your document.getElementById: you repeat it 7 times what a waste. Etc., etc.

Re: Markup validation of http://www.google.com

#20

Post by ceejayoz » Thu, Nov 04, 2010, 5:52 PM UTC

rimantas wrote: post #15

[deleted] wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Google might have their reasons to ignore the standards—but I very much doubt of their validity. E.g. all those bgcolor=#ffffff text=#000000 link=#0000cc vlink=#551a8b alink=#ff0000 attributes onbody element. You may claim that these are intended to support the older browsers which have no CSS support. Well, dissable CSS and take a look at google.com to see how much water does this argument hold. And even if there ar…

> And even if there are valid reasons for invalid markup, there is no reason to have DOCTYPE of the actuall standard if you are not going to follow it.

Sure there is. They want browsers to render the page with the latest standards support, even if they have a few trivial violations of that standard.