- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2006 15:42:18 +0200
On Dec 18, 2006, at 12:57, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote: > "XHTML (broken)" for non-well-formed XHTML. Search engines should not list ill-formed application/xhtml+xml at all, because a user following the link would see the YSoD. However, in cases of slightly broken text/html, the user could still find the page useful. The search engines are in the business of providing results that users find useful, so search engines should list slightly broken text/html documents. > I can imagine end-users ignoring such warnings because they don't > understand or care. Umm. The point is that you shouldn't show users something that they don't understand or care about. > I think you underestimate the brand power of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. > Rightly or wrongly, end-users trust these guys. If Google says 90% of > the web is corrupted, but Google otherwise functions normally, then > 90% > of the web is corrupted. Google, Yahoo and MSN aren't in the business of enforcing a standards- compliance agenda. On the contrary, they compete on how well they can rank the relevance of search results even in the absence of the supposedly seache-engine-helping semantic markup. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen at iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Monday, 18 December 2006 05:42:18 UTC