[whatwg] several messages about XML syntax and HTML5

[Henri Sivonen]

On Dec 18, 2006, at 12:57, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:

> "XHTML (broken)" for non-well-formed XHTML.

Search engines should not list ill-formed application/xhtml+xml at  
all, because a user following the link would see the YSoD. However,  
in cases of slightly broken text/html, the user could still find the  
page useful. The search engines are in the business of providing  
results that users find useful, so search engines should list  
slightly broken text/html documents.

> I can imagine end-users ignoring such warnings because they don't
> understand or care.

Umm. The point is that you shouldn't show users something that they  
don't understand or care about.

> I think you underestimate the brand power of Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
> Rightly or wrongly, end-users trust these guys. If Google says 90% of
> the web is corrupted, but Google otherwise functions normally, then  
> 90%
> of the web is corrupted.

Google, Yahoo and MSN aren't in the business of enforcing a standards- 
compliance agenda. On the contrary, they compete on how well they can  
rank the relevance of search results even in the absence of the  
supposedly seache-engine-helping semantic markup.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/