[whatwg] several messages about XML syntax and HTML5

[Spartanicus]

"Mike Schinkel" <mikeschinkel at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Google, Yahoo and MSN aren't in the business of enforcing a 
>> standards- compliance agenda.
>
>Who is?

A better question to ask would be "to whom does it matter?". SE's have
nothing to gain from markup validity. They should serve up results
relevant to their users, their users use tag soup parsers with error
correcting mechanisms.

What might be a slight bonus to them: a properly defined error handling
mechanism that is very closely matched to what browsers do, ergo what
the WhatWG parsing spec aims for.

>And at the risk of sounding snarky, can you point me to a
>reference where is it codified that they are not (at least partially) in the
>business of standards? 

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yahoo.com
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tech.msn.com

Should give some indication.

(I had to cheat slightly with MSN, the sneaky boys made the home page on
msn.com validate to throw people off, but as I suspected the document at
the first link from msn.com I tried failed validation :-)

-- 
Spartanicus

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