Sunday, April 8, 2007

I'm not impressed.

Google. Yahoo!. MSN. These companies are all internet corporate giants. So they probably have top-of-the-line coding and web pages, right?

Wrong.

Check out Google's source code. It's horrible. Why are you still using attributes like bgcolor and vlink? They have cutting edge search engine technology, and yet their own site leaves much to be desired. A quick validation check and Google's source code returns 64 errors. Yahoo's source code is only slightly better, but a site as complex as Yahoo is bound to have a long stylesheet and they didn't bother making an external stylesheet. That thing is huge -- you can scroll for minutes.

No wonder website development standards are so trampled on - "the big players aren't doing it, so why should we?" is probably quite a common mindset among designers. There's no pressure anywhere to change low-quality and error-riddled code into something meaningful.

Google certainly isn't spending their billions of dollars in revenue on attempting to conform to web standards.