BECOME AN EGGHEAD. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR RSS FEED OR FOLLOW US ON TWITTER! Learn to be as nerdy as we are by never missing our latest blog entries. Receive great tips, tricks, and ideas on improving your web site every day! Subscribe via our RSS Feed, follow us, or use the chicklets in the sidebar for more options.

X

Is the world upside down?  By way of Jake's post on blog.outer-court.com, Microsoft was the only search engine that passed the W3C Markup Validation Service test in flying colors — no errors.  All the other search engines bit the dust.  Google came in fourth with 61 errors.

Was it not Matt Cutts who said in one of his videos that HTML standards-compliance should not be a top priority for the web master, but it should not be entirely ignored either?  So why is Google seemingly not following its own advice?

My guess is that they do it deliberately.  I looked, and none of their errors are particulary egregious.  Most of them involve not quoting attributes, accomodating browsers that are non-standard themselves, etc.  Maybe it saves a bit of bandwidth in the aggregate to leave out those quotes.  I'm actually not a big believer in obsessive-compulsive standards-compliance.  None of my HTML validates — and I really don't care.  I just make sure it renders in everything.

But it's still funny that the vendor who brought you the most disgustingly non-standards-compliant browser on earth also brought you the only search engine page that validates

1st place – MSN – Passed!
2nd place – Altavista – Failed, 38 errors
3rd place – Yahoo – Failed, 41 errors
4th place – Google – Failed, 61 errors
5th place – Ask.com – Failed, 64 errors
Runner-up – Dogpile – Failed, 70 errors