Web Standards at Google

Jens Meiert, October 2, 2008 / October 25, 2008.

This entry is filed under Web Development, Accessibility.

As an exception, I’m writing as a Googler here: At Google, we care about web standards. Officially, that is no real news, but taking into account all ongoing criticism for the code of our pages (see e.g. posts by Joe, Roger, Matt Webb, Jeff Starr, Monday By Noon, Standardzilla, and others), it probably is.

So as someone who’s responsible for the quality and performance of Google pages as well I’d like to point out that on the one hand, there are particular reasons why some of our products do not formally validate or mean some “potential” when it comes to semantics, and that on the other hand, we very well publish documents that adhere to web standards.

Only focusing on the latter and without giving too much details for now (I might write about that and especially my work at Google later though), here are some random examples, mainly microsites, that might indicate these efforts:

I hope this sample helps clarifying that we do care about standards. So there are a few Google products and pages out there that deserve some attention and special care, yes, but maybe this post sheds some new light on our code.

Enjoy the most popular posts, probably including:

Comments

On October 2, 2008, 22:23 CEST, Dave said:

Why do some people make such a big deal of insisting that they know better than Google? You get so much farther in life if look for reasons why people do what they do than if you focus on tearing down.
On October 2, 2008, 22:50 CEST, pepelsbey said:

Wimbledon 2008 — 404 error.

And — yes — we in Yandex (search engine and services, Google’s rival in Russia) taking care about web standards too Not so much as we would like to, but…
On October 2, 2008, 23:48 CEST, David Alfaro said:

Having web standard compliant pages is the safe bet for assuring the pages work well across a wide range of browsers. Also take a look a this blog post titled: Web Standards and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Does Google care about the quality of your markup?
http://tinyurl.com/5slotf
On October 3, 2008, 7:31 CEST, Robert said:

From my impression, people express the majority of their “Google vs. W3 standards” critisism while they judge the search page’s quality, and not one of the smaller Google properties you mentioned.

Most of the critics do understand/suspect that Google has to be scarce on just about every byte of bandwidth and relate markup errors to an attempt to reduce page weight, but a closer look reveals that Google Search’s invalid markup won’t save a lot and even causes the opposite effect on occassions.

A technical explanation of the reasons behind these design decisions would make for a very interesting contribution to this debate, even if some trade secrets would limit the amount of detail.

Google is certainly producing every single element of their markup on purpose, isn’t it?
On October 3, 2008, 20:33 CEST, Dave said:

“Google is certainly producing every single element of their markup on purpose, isn’t it? ”

As a total outsider, I would assume that the HTML for Google’s most important property is deliberate and perfect, or a 20% project would have already fixed it.
On October 3, 2008, 21:31 CEST, Joe Clark said:

I assume “particular reasons” is not synonymous with “airtight or even rationally defensible reasons.”

If code concision is the goal, you can sure leave out a lot of tags in HTML and still produce a good document.
On October 4, 2008, 9:49 CEST, Ben Buchanan said:

The people at Google may care about standards, but Google-the-company shows no serious commitment.

Flagship products don’t validate; services like Gmail have a long history of bad cross-browser support (heavy irony for the Chrome team); we’ve been told that valid sites won’t index or rank better than crap sites.

So I’m afraid Google’s track record speaks louder than ten valid microsites.

Google’s sin is one of omission. Google has the world’s attention and could make standards compliance into a “must have” just by telling people to do it. But, Google does not do that. So, by omission, Google-the-company does more harm than good for standards.

All I can really say is keep fighting the good fight
On October 4, 2008, 14:43 CEST, Jens Meiert said:

Dave, David, thanks for dropping by.

Вадим, maybe there was a temporary problem, the Wimbledon page seems to work (again). Interesting to learn about Yandex; I didn’t know them yet.

Robert, indeed, focus often lies on Google’s homepage as well as the results pages, but Google’s code base is a little bit larger anyway I guess

Joe, I know where you’re heading …

Ben, well, I’m not sure if actively contributing to standards organizations, standards advancement, and standards implementation can be considered “no serious commitment”. And taking into account this as well as the examples, another “perspective” is legit I guess. Anyway, thanks, and yes, I’m not lazy either
On October 22, 2008, 2:22 CEST, Kim said:

For better or worse, Google in particular has become a role model for Internet web design behavior. Therefore the underlying message (the one people pay attention to) is that web standards are a nice idea but not practical.

I truly think they should make this a priority. The other big role model (and offender) in regard to web standards is Amazon, who seems to totally disregard the issue. “I’m too big to care about your silly rules”.

This is the future of the Internet guys, it’s vital.

Jens Meiert

Web Standards at Google

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