Alasdair Mackenzie

Bad Google: Can anyone at Google write XHTML?

Alasdair — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 20:38:57 +0000

What is Google? Well, Google is a publicly run company that was founded in 1998. It also happens to provided almost 4 billion search results per month. It�s used by around 55% of people in the United States and is the number one search engine. Oh, and it turns over about $4billion (although that�s bound to be much more now).

So why can�t it get a simple web page right? Google.com has 50 validation errors when queried with W3C Html Validation Service. Now, I know that some of these errors are a consequence of other problems, but my argument still stands. Surely one of the 17,000 has suggested that they fix it?

What�s wrong with the biggest Internet company�s web site…

The Head

No doctype � �Don�t forget to add a doctype� is the title of a page in the W3C guidelines, so why has Google forgotton? Maybe to shove the browser into Quirks Mode? Hmmm… More about quirks mode. Oh, and if your Google, here�s how to define a doctype.
The style tags have no attribute type. should be Maybe this is a doctype issue?
The script tags have no attribute type should be .
We can let Google away with no Meta data (I suppose).
A language would be nice. Let�s just presume that Google has its own made up one.

The Body

The main tag is insane. The old school page properties are a) old and b) pointless as there is a style element defined in the head. And there are no quotes around these, which is a parsers worst nightmare!! Some of them, like TOPMARGIN, are not even �real� attributes. Blaming it all on the incorrect doctype is simply not good enough here.
The JavaScript is executable, but not pretty. There is a delimiter (;) after the first function but not inside the if statement.
Span tags are used for the menu system. A much better idea would be an unordered list.
- Web
- Mail
There are more attributes on the page without quote around them
More out of date tags like
Tables to mark up the search. This is one of my pet hates in web design. Tables are for tabular data!!
is outdated in itself -a big company like Google should be using semantic HTML
, but that isn�t even the issue here. There are multiple occurrences of two line breaks (

) being next to each other - these should be on their own.
There are also a load of horrible mistakes that mean Google won’t validate. An example would be using & instead of & or not closing a tag.

I remember reading an article in .net about accessibility and Google. It was an interview with one of Google�s disability gurus (who also happened to be visually impaired). He was adamant that Google take care to make sure screen readers can read Google�s pages. What now strikes me as odd is that he used the phrase �modern screen readers�. Google�s landing page isn�t even modern! Granted Google alt all their images, but that doesn�t excuse the long menu which doesn�t provide any way of skipping past it. The screen reader on my machine, WebbIE (part of Thunder), reads out every single item in the span tag by default. Not nice.

The only thing that I could maybe forgive Google�s lacklustre homepage is that it renders perfectly even if CSS is disabled. That means that it can cater for audiences far and wide running 20,000 year old machines. Okay, I exaggerate, but why not have an alternative to the main page that handles older browsers.

Don�t get me wrong I�m no accessibility or web design guru, but common sense should tell Google to update the home page.

I might be making a bold statement by saying that Google is the be all and end all of the internet, so I won�t. I will say, however, that it would be nice to see one of the most visited pages on earth validate.

Acid 3 - Results are um.. interesting…

Alasdair — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:00:42 +0000

What is Acid? a set of browser tests defined by the Web Standards Project (originally created by Todd Fahrner)

Acid 1 (1998) was designed to test CSS v1
Acid 2 (2005) was designed to test HTML and CSS v2 (results)
Acid 3 (2008) was designed to test much more… (in fact see the official web standard website for details and take the test)

Now… Check the latest Acid 3 results.

Internet Explorer (IE) 8 is does very badly, IE 7 does a wee bit better and IE 5.5 does even better!!!! (and let’s not mention IE 6)

Draw conclusions for yourself. :-p

Microsoft, Internet Explorer 8 and Super Standards

Alasdair — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 01:15:07 +0000

It’s about time Microsoft started letting some hints drop about the next version of the worlds most popular browser. Recently (19 December 2007), Microsoft has started to reveal the features…

Passes Acid 2 test - YES
Backwards Compatibility - YES
Contains “Super Standards” support - Hmmmm YES

I’m not too sure how I feel about this. I’ve read a lot of articles that praise the team’s efforts and think that it’s a good idea, but I’m not too sure about specifying a browser for the simple reason that it closes the market for other browsers (more on that point once I’ve explained the new mode).

In this post I’m going to tell you what it is, how it’s been done and what I think.

So, what’s it like then?

“Quirks mode” remains the same, and compatible with current content.
“Standards mode” remains the same as IE7, and compatible with current content.
If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple element.

And how is it done?

Via a meta tag:

meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8;FF=3;OtherUA=4″

If I’m being honest then I wouldn’t have done it that way.

…back to my point about closing the market for other browsers. Okay, I know what you’re thinking now, “OtherUA=4” means that no one browser will be left out, right? Wrong. Why bother with the IE=8, FF=3 then?

Read more about previous attempts to save the world (quirks mode).
This is a great article on super standards mode.
And an article about the specifications from Aaron Gustafson, who was a member of the WaSP-Microsoft task force (who devised the scheme).

One quick note on Aaron Gustafson’s article, he says,

“Having the ability to lock your site to a particular browser version is fantastic for ensuring that your site will be usable well into the future”

What about how far back browsers will have to support? In 10 years time there might be documents floating about with “otherUA=4″. What if it’s on version 999,999 and it hits this page?

And if I’m being entirely honesty I’m a bit confused about how this is all going to work in the real world. Please comment if you think I’m wrong :-p

The Power of WordPress Themes

Alasdair — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 06:38:56 +0000

Okay, I admit that WordPress template file structure annoys me, but it is pretty powerful (once you mess around with it a bit).>If you toggle between the stylesheets I have associated with this site then you can see a few other designs I use.

In Firefox: View->Page Style-> Select one.

I know they aren�t drastically different in structure, but I happen to like the way my page is laid out. So… :-p

Internet Explorer 8

Alasdair — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:46:24 +0000

Nick White, a project manager for Windows Vista, has posted some good news about the next release of Internet Explorer 8 - it renders the Acid 2 test perfectly. Welcome news!

There will also be no more hasLayout, which is a good shout as it was originally designed to be an internal data structure and was never meant to be exposed.

More in the Internet explorer 8 team blog.

Good Times. : )

CSS Hacks

Alasdair — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:44:45 +0000

“But the fact remains that every browser out there has its quirks, and while problems should generally be dealt with by amending your design on a global basis, sometimes that’s not possible or practical” - .net mag.

I couldn’t disagree more. The fact is that browser standards will never improve if the attitude of web professionals is that hacks are ‘designed to cater for browser shortcomings’.

All that happens is that the web site becomes complex (with loads of horrible mark-up) and the vendor has to keep the rendering bug in order to make sure they don’t break old web sites.

There is a really good argument against using hacks on Digital Web by Peter-Paul Koch. He also writes and maintains the brilliant Quirksmode.org web site.

Google off / Google on…

Ally — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 13:35:17 +0000

If this looks familiar then it’s a shame.

[if IE]>

For years Microsoft provided, knowingly and unwittingly (usually because of parsing errors/ conditional comments), the ability to ‘hack’ away at a web page to make it look right in Internet explorer.

In my opinion it is wrong to change the way the web works to suit a particular vendor, but it’s the norm and, admittedly, it does help solve a lot of problems (and I have used it).

Anyway, enough said about Microsoft, Google’s at it now! **[see note]

Accessibility

“The googleoff/googleon tags disable the indexing of a part of a web page. The result is that those pages do not appear in search results when users search for the tagged word or phrase. For example, some developers use googleoff/googleon tags to comment out a navigation bar in static HTML pages.” [Paul Haymen]

I’m all for meta tags to do this:

But, as I said, it’s my feeling that custom code / tags in HTML documents should be avoided, but I suppose getting higher in Google outweighs the disadvantages for 99.9% of people (and just in case you’re wondering where that accessibility example came from: adobe.com, which has a PageRank 10 by the way - and, at least, a $30,000 GSA investment).

I’ve also no idea when Google introduced this. The earliest mention I can find is January 2007.

You would think organizations would have learned not to tinker, after all theW3C is there for a reason.

If you want to find out more about it then Paul Hayman has written a concise tutorial about GoogleOff.

**Note: I should point out that this is not actually implemented in the Google Web Search. It’s a function of Google Appliance, which is for enterprise search (which is besides the point).

Acid 2 - Screenshots and Information

Alasdair — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:20:26 +0000

I’ve been thinking about comparing all the major browsers in regards to the Acid 2 test, but I found this brilliant page on How to create that goes into a lot of detail about the acid 2 test and includes screenshots too.

CSS 3 - The Long Road to a Brighter Place

Ally — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:19:47 +0000

In the past few years CSS has really come though and to not use it is frowned upon by peers, but the problem is that it isn’t implemented the same inside every browser. Some browsers render complex CSS perfectly and some perform pretty badly. The Acid 2 test is a pretty good indicator of how good the browser is in this department. You can see some comparisons on the Acid 2 test Wikipedia page.

Over six years in the making CSS 3 will help spice things up and make life easier, especially for multi-column based sites (like newspapers), but I can’t help but feel that it’s going to be at least 5 years before every browser is compatible… and by that I mean we’ll be waiting on IE.

Note: There is a nice web site that previews CSS 3 called CSS info.

CSS - Consistency

Ally — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:03:20 +0000

Every product is different; some drinks are fizzier than others. This is because there is no right answer and it comes down to what the manufacturer thinks is best. And browsers are no exception.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) simplifies web development in an arbitrary number of ways by reducing complexity and improving semantic structure, but the one thing that really!, really! bugs me about CSS is how some browsers have different and sometimes strange defaults.

This can cause problems down the line for developers, so the best way to get round this is to zero the defaults. Yahoo developer have a very good solution for this called the “reset.css”

Code licensed under the BSD License:

http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt

version: 2.3.1

body {color:#000;background:#FFF;}

body,div,dl,dt,dd,ul,ol,li,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,pre,code,form,fieldset,legend,input,textarea,p,blockquote,th,td{margin:0;padding:0;}

table{border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:0;}

fieldset,img{border:0;}

address,caption,cite,code,dfn,em,strong,th,var{font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;}

li {list-style:none;}

caption,th {text-align:left;}

h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{font-size:100%;font-weight:normal;}

q:before,q:after{content:”;}

abbr,acronym {border:0;font-variant:normal;}

sup,sub {line-height:-1px;vertical-align: text-top;}

sub {vertical-align:text-bottom;}

input, textarea, select{font-family:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-weight:inherit;}

It would be nice to have someway of saying to the browser “Hey! I want to set everything to 0″. It worries me that Microsoft might realize this and we’ll end up with some obscure Internet Explorer conditional comment to do it…

*shudders* Standards are becoming more and more important and I’m pretty sure Microsoft won’t walk down that kind of road again, but hey! you never know.