[whatwg] Article: Growing pains afflict HTML5 standardization

[Mike Wilcox]

On Jul 12, 2010, at 7:58 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:

> On 12.07.2010 14:44, Mike Wilcox wrote:
>> On Jul 12, 2010, at 2:30 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
>>> Google:
>>> <http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
>>> <http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0>>
>>> - 35 errors
>> 
>> That's a little different. Google purposely uses unstandardized,
>> incorrect HTML in ways that still render in a browser in order to make
>> it more difficult for screen scrapers. They also "break it" in a
>> different way every week.
> 
> How exactly is it different?
> 
> Do you think that what Google does somehow is "better"?
> 
> Just asking.

Not better... on purpose. Proactive sabotage if you will.

> 
> As far as I can tell, it just shows that content providers continue to send whatever happens to work, thus are not concerned at all about validity (note: there's a permathread about this as well -- why disallow things that are known the work reliably...).

I agree, and some pages I've seen and used makes my head want to burst. Clients will tell me "Don't give us code that slows down our page!" and I look at their code and I think "Really?"

In defense of CNET, I looked at the source code and it's not the worst markup I've seen. I looked at the validation errors again, and a vast amount of them are caused by ad services and social network plugins. 

That's still a problem (also one to burst my head), but a different problem.

Mike