I, like you, am a fan of Google search. Hell, I’m pretty much a fan of Google everything - but I don’t understand why Google’s pages are so anti-standards compliant. I have yet to come across a Google page that validates, as anything.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the W3C’s markup validator. Type in the URL to your favorite page and see if it validates. Each version of (X)HTML has a specification that strictly defines it’s rules. The validator parses the HTML tree and will tell you if any of the rules have been broken. Google, as it turns out, breaks about every rule there is.

Does this really matter to you? Probably not - but you should realize that web standards exist for a reason. The reason is so applications (browsers, parsing engines, etc.) can be written while making some assumptions, not having to reinvent the wheel. We have standards in order to abstract away some detail, and make things a little smoother and easier for (among many, many other things) automation. For instance, we have standard weights and measures. That means if I go into my car to loosen a nut, it is a given that if I have a complete standard set of wrenches, I have a wrench that will fit that nut. Imagine if that were not the case, if anyone anywhere just decided to create a size of their own. You would need a specific toolset for anything that used it’s own measures. Someone would have to put a stop to that.

That is what the W3C tries to do. They ratify and release standards so the rest of us can count on something to be a certain way all of the time. Somebody, please tell Google. They have 8 billion dollars and more PHDs than my graduate department. So how about some standards compliance?