Is the Google homepage HTML standards compliant?
No. According to the official World Wide Web Consortium validator, the Google homepage fails validation with 30 errors. It also doesn’t use any document type declaration to begin with. The Google homepage also uses long-deprecated syntax like font tags. Some have argued that Google uses old-school, invalid HTML to save bandwidth or support older browsers, but tests have shown this may well not be the case. The simpler truth seems to be that many Google departments simply don’t know (or don’t care) about validation and web standards too much. For instance, Google recently released a snippet to be included by users of Google Analytics; a little while later, they had to issue a change asking webmasters to replace the code once again, and some changes were due to the old code not passing validation. You will also often find Google engineers mixing up terminology when they talk about HTML. Also, for instance, iGoogle gadgets are delivered in an inline frame which itself lacks any document t
No. According to the official World Wide Web Consortium validator, the Google homepage fails validation with 30 errors. It also doesn’t use any document type declaration to begin with. The Google homepage also uses long-deprecated syntax like font tags. Some have argued that Google uses old-school, invalid HTML to save bandwidth or support older browsers, but tests have shown this may well not be the case. The simpler truth seems to be that many Google departments simply don’t know (or don’t care) about validation and web standards too much. For instance, Google recently released a snippet to be included by users of Google Analytics; a little while later, they had to issue a change asking webmasters to replace the code once again, and some changes were due to the old code not passing validation. You will also often find Google engineers mixing up terminology when they talk about HTML.
