[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?".
>
>Is it really relevant to give your opinion of my grammer?

I didn't, "who is [in the business of enforcing a standards- compliance
agenda]" is a different question than "to whom does [standards
compliance] matter". I wanted to make the point that standards
compliance is in itself irrelevant to SE users/the average web user.

>> SE's have nothing to gain from markup validity. 
>
>Of course they do.  Better markup makes the results of their web page
>analysis more accurate, especially when semantic markup is involved.  That
>can lead to better search engine results.

I'm not seeing much evidence of that. Afaics SEs are interested in text
content, links, title content and if you're lucky they may treat header
content slightly differently. They seem to treat the most of the other
angled bracket stuff as noise, and justifiably so.

Proper semantics and correctly structured content could be of benefit,
but that is a very different, and much higher goal than mere compliance
with the technical rules of a markup language.

Markup validity is irrelevant to SEs, not only do they currently not
care about it, they likely never will, since there's nothing to be
gained from it.

>> They should serve up results relevant to their users, 
>
>Again, you state "should" as if you are quoting from an authority. In a free
>market, I'm not aware of such an authority except in limited cases where I
>don't see that this applies.  So "should" is just your narrow viewed opinion
>which is no more "correct" than my broader viewed opinion.

"should" (in lower case) should not <g> be read as per  RFC 2119, that
should be (I'm a bad boy) reserved to the upper case usage of the word.

I'm going back to lurk mode, as I've strayed well beyond the purpose of
this list (sorry).

-- 
Spartanicus

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