Web sites that don't adhere to the W3C standards

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Gabor!

And everybody.

On Monday 13 April 2009 17:23:24 Gabor Szabo wrote:
> Every now and then we complain about one of the Israeli web sites that
> don't work
> in Firefox.
> AFAIK the usual response is that they should build their site based on
> the W3C standards.
> I thought it must be something good that large International web aware
> companies must
> already do so I checked Google.com, Yahoo.com and just so we can laugh
> MSN.com
>
> http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com%2F&charset=(detec
>t+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
> http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yahoo.com%2F&charset=(de
>tect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.654
> http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.msn.com%2F&charset=(dete
>ct+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.654
>

(sorry for breaking the URLs - see the original message for the unbroken ones)

> From the three only MSN passed the validation.
>
> So why do the other two disregard the standard?
> Do they care less about Firefox than Microsoft?

First of all, one should understand that many not-entirely-valid sites (or 
even some that are very non-standards-compliant) will still be displayed well 
by Firefox and other major browsers. Firefox and other browsers attempt to do-
the-right-thing when encountering markup or code that's not entirely standards 
compliant. Otherwise, we could expect many pages that are either old or poorly 
coded to break there.

Now, what Google does is serve markup that is extremely optimised for being 
small, and as a result completely non-valid, that is still handled correctly 
by Firefox, MSIE, and other browsers. I'm pretty sure Google cares about 
Firefox and that its workers test their pages with it, but they still opted to 
prefer increasing the download/display speed of their pages (which is roughly 
proportional to the size of the data sent to the browser) while making their 
markup non-valid.

I don't know about Yahoo for sure.

As for msn.com - I don't know why Microsoft went into the effort of making 
their pages valid, but we should applaud them for this fact. One should note 
that even if pages are valid, they may still not work well on various 
browsers, and may have other usability or accessibility problems. [MSN-on-FF] 
But it's still a step in the right direction, 

To sum up, if a site validates, then it's a good thing. But it still doesn't 
preclude (or guarantee) that it will have other compatibility, usability or 
accessibility issues. One should look at the general state of a site's 
quality, and not just what the validator says.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

[MSN-on-FF] - I don't recall MSN.com pages breaking on Firefox, but I haven't 
visited MSN.com often. I seem to have read on http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ 
that the online version of MSDN (The MS Developer Network) used to work only 
on IE (and possibly still only works on it), but I don't know what the current 
situation is.

>
>
> Gabor
>
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-il mailing list
> Linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
> http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/ways_to_do_it.html

God gave us two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we
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