The other day i was surfing around, wasting time. The net is a great way to waste time, and my question is whom to see about getting that time back. No wait, thats not the question i was going for. Why doesnt google validate according to the w3c standards ?!
The extremely simply google frontpage does not validate according to the w3c standards. Why ? I have no answer for this. But my curiosity got peaked and i started googling (invalid results ? 😉 ) for some answers.
It would seem that google once DID validate, according to google employee, Mihai Parparita. In his personal blog he writes this:
There’s a perception that Google doesn’t care about valid HTML, since bandwidth costs trump correctness. While that thinking has merit for high traffic sites, there’s more leeway on our smaller properties. Specifically, I was happy to discover that Google Video validates. And it’s not just the relatively simple front page, search results validate too.
Abit the post is nearing 2 years in age, i still find it curious that the google pages once did follow standards, but no longer. Did i simply make a mistake when checking for validity ? Well talking apart some more results on the topic i found the following post on the same topic:
The myth that Google is using invalid markup to save bandwidth is clearly just a myth.
Hmm invalid markup to save bandwith. Well seems resonable enough. Fewer characters = less bandwith. And there are plenty of characters you can save away like quotes. Another link has a story on exactly why googles frontpage uses non-validated code. Here is what Google’s Matt Cutts once argued:
Google’s home page doesn’t validate and that’s mostly by design to save precious bytes. Will the world end because Google doesn’t put quotes around color attributes? No, and it makes the page load faster.
So the invalid page is supposed to shave previous characters off the page, and make it load faster. Seems really really resonable with google being one of the most popular search engines around, that optimising the site for lightning load times is extremely important. But this story isnt so simple. Because Roger Johansson ((A Swedish web professional specialising in web standards, accessibility, and usability)) recreated the frontpage using standards and came up with this strange result;
…the result is a valid HTML 4.01 Strict file that is 3 902 bytes large. Google’s invalid kinda-HTML 2.something very-loose is 4 944 bytes. The valid and strict version is 1 042 bytes smaller. That’s 21 percent savings on bandwidth costs.
So why would google still be using a non-standard frontpage and subsequent pages for that matter. I found no more recent material on this matter. But perhaps somebody knows why. Im still curious to know, especially since a company the size of google i would expect they could spare at least one employee to make the pages valid code. As shows coding according to standards doesnt increase the size of the page, and thus should reduce bandwith usage.
More on the topic if i should find out more.. feel free to leave comments and enlighten the subject. I stress that im merely posing an open question here, so no flaming from any side please ! Play nice 😉
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