I was on the Yahoo! homepage recently and noticed that they still don’t have a background color specified for their page. It’s a quirky pet peeve I picked up a while back. I used to make my default browser background color something other than white so I’d easily know if didn’t set that attribute when I created a web page. Yahoo! hasn’t had a background color specified for as long as I could remember, and it used to look fine since the page was almost all text, but now it looks pretty ugly.
So I wondered, if the Yahoo! designers couldn’t bother enough to set a background color, did they bother enough to make sure that the homepage was valid HTML? I ran it through the W3C validator and to my amazement the homepage failed with 261 errors.
From there I thought I’d compare a number of other top search engine and portal sites. Here are the results from 15 sites:
| SITE | RESULT | DOCTYPE |
|---|---|---|
| Yahoo! | Failed validation, 261 errors | No DOCTYPE found! |
| Lycos | Failed validation, 255 errors | No DOCTYPE found! |
| Excite | Failed validation, 243 errors | HTML 4.0 Transitional |
| Ask | Failed validation, 59 errors | HTML 4.01 Transitional |
| LookSmart | Failed validation, 58 errors | XHTML 1.0 Transitional |
| Failed validation, 50 errors | No DOCTYPE found! | |
| AltaVista | Failed validation, 38 errors | No DOCTYPE found! |
| Netscape | Failed validation, 36 errors | No DOCTYPE found! |
| A9 | Failed validation, 36 errors | No DOCTYPE found! |
| HotBot | Failed validation, 28 errors | XHTML 1.0 Strict |
| AlltheWeb | Failed validation, 19 errors | XHTML 1.0 Transitional |
| WiseNut | Failed validation, 13 errors | No DOCTYPE found! |
| Gigablast | Failed validation, 11 errors | HTML 4.01 Transitional |
| AOL | Failed validation, 9 errors | XHTML 1.0 Transitional |
| MSN | Failed validation, 2 errors | XHTML 1.0 Strict |
I find this amazing. With all the reasons why web standards matter, why don’t the developers of these major sites care enough to make sure the home pages are created with valid markup?
I do have to give props to MSN though. Sure, the page still didn’t validate, but they get extra marks for being validated against the XHTML Strict doctype. And given that the page has a lot more on it than a site like Google, that’s relatively impressive. It’s ironic that the company that brought us the browser most standards-conscious designers hate happened to win this particular shootout.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Computer Guru // Mar 26, 2006 at 10:08 am
You have to realize, MSN is XHTML Strict.. and still only 2 mistakes… WOW
2 Recursive Function » Blog Archive » I still don’t understand Google // Apr 21, 2006 at 11:13 am
[...] I mentioned earlier how MSN did the best job of complying with web standards (I should point out that the MSN Search homepage actually validates completely with the XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype — I validated the MSN homepage previously). Could it really be that MSN also does a better job than Google at indexing the web? [...]
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