[whatwg] several messages about XML syntax and HTML5
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
Mon Dec 18 05:42:18 PST 2006
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/
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