Thursday, September 06, 2007

Google Disappointment

...do it. You just might find a page with me ... pointing at Google on my screen.

Today I was messing around with some of the CSS styling in my API documentation for one of our company's merchant partners, and I found that some of the elements weren't quite right. I then remembered an article I had read on Digg regarding CSS reset stylesheets, and how Google and Yahoo both use them in their free APIs to provide consistent styling results across browsers, so I went to investigate using one of said reset stylesheets to help me out. I figured I'd Google it first (no pun intended), and upon not finding anything relevant quickly, figured Google would be smart enough to use their own reset stylesheets in their own pages. I pulled up the source on one of my query pages, only to discover a developer's horror : inline styling all over the place, and google didn't even use their own stylesheets anywhere in their main site! The code was horrible spaghetti. I ran the page through the W3C web site validator, and it didn't pass a single standard, ie HTML 4.01 / XHTML (any flavour). As one of the big Web 2.0 sites, I would have expected you to have higher regard for international web standards. I'm very disappointed in you Google.

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