Google, Make Your Products Standards Compliant!

Poor compliance to standards has always been the Google’s skunk under the porch. Why, with their brain trust, can’t they get their markup right? This question really shouts with the release of their Accessible Web Search.

Bring up the Accessible Web Search (http://labs.google.com/accessible/). There’s the nice, clean, classic Google interface. Now validate the page (http://tinyurl.com/kp8jd). Validation fails with 5 errors. Ouch. The relationship between standards is not widely understood among developers, but among accessibilistas the minimal level of accessibility happens when the markup validates to standards, preferably XHTML.

Starting with the basics, there's no character encoding specified in the markup. C’mon! The body tag has an attribute that doesn't exist, some ommited end tags, a bit of sloppiness here and there. Except for the lack of character encoding, no big deal. On the other hand, it's no big deal to fix, either.

The real hoot comes with validating the response page. The response page to the search term "accessibility" had 172 errors. Most fundamentally, it had no DOCTYPE statement. Enough said, methinks. Looking at the other errors, many were somewhat picky, but easily avoided with some love and care. That's not to say that the quality of the resources found vis-a-vis page accessibility were not as intended. I can't really speak to the results, actually, but I'd love a peek at the search algorithm.

Complaints about Accessible Web Search aside, it could be a great service. On the other hand, there's lots to complain about in Google's other products and services. It's not hard to generate standards-compliant code. Why does Google put up with poor markup?