Markup validation of http://www.google.com

Whenever I see things along this line, I think back to something a mentor and close friend of mine has said, repeatedly:<p><pre><code> You should never do this. Unless you have a really good reason. </code></pre> Do not think for one second someone from Google is going to see this and go, "Oh darn it, I knew I was supposed to do something before google went live."

Virtually all of those are "use CSS instead" or "use &#38;amp; instead of &#38;".<p>External CSS on Google's home page would mean billions of extra HTTP requests. Adding the amp; would mean terabytes of data transfer to fix something that works just fine in all browsers.

See <a href="http://www.seoconsultants.com/validation/google/" rel="nofollow">http://www.seoconsultants.com/validation/google/</a>

I read somewhere that they would rather have the page load as fast as possible on all kinds of browsers rather then have a standards compliant slow loading page.

Is my memory failing me or was there indeed the time when google.com had no DOCTYPE? That makes perfect sense if you are not going to adhere to any standards. I suppose the reason they have a doctype now is to force browsers into standards compliant rendering mode (it would be quirks otherwise). What baffles me why did they choose HTML5 doctype if they don't care about actually adhering to the spec. They can go with &#60;!DOCTYPE google&#62; and it will work just fine (any unknown doctype triggers standards compliant mode in browsers) without false claim of being compliant with some actual standard.

Ehm, they are either using obsolete tags or failed escaped the &#38; sign. Nothing to be worried about.

How has this reached the front page :|

It seems obvious to me, but I will point it out anyway.<p>The Google homepage contains all sorts of 'non-conformant' code, so as it supports legacy browsers which don't implement css properly, or require some sort of quirk for them to work correctly.

This is probably related to a really old HN post: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677125" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677125</a>

So if it's OK for Google to skip on standards, it's OK for the rest of us too. right?

Google is well aware and proud of that fact. They cut their bandwidth in half by not validating.<p>I was playing with jQuery in the dev console in Chrome yesterday on the Google homepage and realized that I was writing valid jQuery, but that $("body") simply didn't exist.

I would have expected better from google.