Ok, just out of curiosity I ran Google through the w3c validator to see if the coders wrote valid code. I found out that Google had 50 errors. One of them was no DOCTYPE! I was surprised that Google has sloppy coders like that. It's not just the fact that it is a big company that generates millions of dollars, but the fact they have created one of the greatest search engines and can't even code correct HTML. The code looks extremely messy. Here is a link to the validation page:[link]

hmm lets see

Google is a huge site / collection of sites.. which generates billions and has been around for longer than xhtml and there are no security issues know of and there are only 50 mistakes! Why would they waste time and money getting it to valid xhtml when I very much doubt there is a single brownser that has trouble displaying it! that is the whole reason for xhtml is to make it browser compatible it is a way of doing this not a set rules everyone has to follow or there site becomes terrible... I've never experienced any problems and they should keep releasing more innovative ideas than worrying about wether or not their code is flawless xhtml!

Yeah I've noticed many companies including major leading players in the IT industry don't even bother to make their code valid to html or xhtml w3c standards. I don't know why they would bother if their code works consistently across certain browsers already. They are probably experienced enough to code html so that it does display across the main browsers correctly without being valid html or xhtml.

It makes you wonder if you should even bother learning to code valid to those standards if the professionals aren't doing it themselves. I see it as a good skill to have none the less and it is better to know how to code to valid html and xhtml standards then to not. All the other hacks to get something to work you can always pickup along the way if needed.

The simple truth is most people only care if it works and the code was probably written along time ago before anyone even cared about html standards. Can anyone name a major IT company that has valid html or xhtml code? I cant think of any myself .

This post has been edited by sonesay: Mar 14 2008, 08:43 PM

I'm not talking about XHTML. I'm talking about HTML 4.01. There is a difference. The code looks awful as well. It could very well have problems displaying in the future as browsers adapt towards standards compliance.

Well, I have to agree with sonesay - as long as the site works across many different browsers without any problem & people at "google's" have no problem updating and managing it, there is NO problem! I have google set as my homepage for a few years now and am currently not planning to change it, since it's load time is amazing! So good code, bad code? Where is the problem if they manage to make it work amazingly fast and also update it regurarly without any noticable problems...

I also think that Google's coders are the best in the world and so I ask my self: "Why would the best coders make a bad website?" My only answer is, there must be a reason for doing so - they probably know exactly why the site is not strict xhtml and that is enough for me. If anyone has the time or is able to get the answer from google, I'd be delighted to hear it

Well... now that I think on it. Google is such a basic website, that in all truth.... it doesn't really need super valid code... Its pretty much going to work... even if it is invalid. Also, certain browsers (especially IE) like to shy away from the standards.... (why I don't know) so really... I guess if you code it to fit every browser fairly good, I don't see what the problem is... But..... if your a perfectionist.... then I guess It'll bother you...

Also I might add, google is based on php, many of their web pages are based on php, writing correct HTML 4.01 might make it more inconvenient for the php coders.

google is a very simple wesbite as said above, but why would they need correct HTML 4.01? It displays correctly on all browsers and the coder's time is probably better spent on improving search engine algorithms are something...