Why doesn't google.com validate?

Michael Thingmand from Denmark asks:

"Why doesn't google.com validate (according to W3C)?"

This video is part of a "Grab Bag" series in which Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team, answers questions from webmasters. We're not currently taking new video questions, so your best bet for getting an answer about webmaster-related search issues is to head to our help forum: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• w3c
• compatibility

[rickvidallon]

W3C validation is not the web developers Holy Grail. Validation does not guarantee a site will look the same from platform to platform, from browser to browser. Validation does not assure that markup is efficiently written or adheres to a given entitys assessment of best practices. What it means is that the developer has coded a functional document and used no markup in addition to that specified by the guidelines.

[woodsandhillsplc]

Agreed, in that it is annoying when Google code for third party things like Analytics mess up your validation.

[hellmind]

They should validate.

Google say you must do the page in way and close our eyes and pray to rank, cuz they will do the right think.

But if we look what they do with their pages,then we should exploit every gap we got to rank no matter what.

So the definition of black hat would be, what google's can't detect.

[whothehellisthat]

I've always thought that validation is unimportant. What's important is the user's experience. No user looks at your code and says 'hmm... that bit there isn't valid. I'm not going to use this site'. For the most part, this goes for accessibility validation, too. Sure, some of it like title attributes, alt tags on images, etc., are a good idea, but there's a lot of annoying unnecessary stuff in there, too.

[TimmmmCam]

Fair enough I suppose, but it doesn't even have a closing html tag! That's just ugly.

[nuboy529]

I don't think they validate when you park at corpoate headquaters either... jerks.

[alundraandseptimus]

@jarrod1937 It's MAJOR late in reply but no, I didnt have other problems. I tested it across all a bunch of OS's and browsers and the ONLY one with an issue was IE. I didnt know why so I just removed it. I couldnt be bothered dealing with it.

The page was white in the beginning then it would crash before loading. On some peoples computers it would just crash out without even starting. I hadnt changed anything on my site at all, just added that. It was fine before it :).

[angadnadk]

Why fix what ain't broken? The aim of standardizing markup is to have no implementation-based differences. If Google can do a good job at that, then there isn't any need for it to comply to a third party's standards, no matter how popular that third party be.