April 1st, 2007

Last year I wrote about Google’s lack of web standards compliance with their pages.

Today I noticed a comment on Mark Pilgrim’s site mentioning his DOCTYPE being off. My thought process was (yeah, I’m a geek): “Well he works for Google now, maybe I’ll check Google’s DOCTYPE to see if it’s similar.”

And this I did. The main page uses a regular old html tag - no DOCTYPE, no nothing. That’s fine, that actually makes sense to me. Going a little further though, I checked out Google Maps.

Hey, it’s XHTML 1.0 Strict! Cool, let’s see how it validates…

186 validation errors. One hundred and eighty-six validation errors .

This company has some of the best talent in the world. They employ Vint freaking Cerf for god sakes. 186 validation errors?

I can understand if they disagree with the W3C recommendations for some reason, but then why the XHTML Strict DOCTYPE, why the namespace and DTD? Why bother even declaring XHTML Strict if you are that far off the mark with it?

3 comments

My site is served as HTML 5.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-doctype

Can’t speak for official Google properties. Does seem like a waste of bits, though.

by Mark on April 1st, 2007 at 1:57 pm

Man, last I heard HTML 5 mentioned was… I can’t even recall - but if you’re reading this you may want to learn more about the WHATWG like I just did.

I should mention though that although this post does mention Mark’s site (specifically a comment therein) it has to do only with my observations of the documents that Google serves. That comment merely lead me to start looking.

by Ryan on April 1st, 2007 at 2:40 pm

Hey Mark, I’m curious. What made you decide to migrate your site to HTML 5, which is still a working draft and, as of yet, unsupported?

I suppose however, that the only aspect of migration was literally adding <!DOCTYPE HTML>

by Ryan on April 1st, 2007 at 8:07 pm
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