Yesterday afternoon, while checking where I was ranked by searching for my name, Lachlan Hunt in Google to see where my site was ranked, I was surprised to see not only was my site ranked 6th, only beaten by my blogger profile, two pages on MSDN’s Channel9 Wiki that I’ve edited, and two Bobby Watchfire accessibility checks of my homepage (I don’t know why! Who’d be linking to those for Google to find?), but the description for my site turned out to be:
File Format: Unrecognized - View as HTML
This is because currently, my homepage is only being served as application/xhtml+xml, and it was surprising for 2 reasons. Firstly, I thought that Google would have at least been designed to be able to parse XHTML, even if it were only doing it as tag-soup like everything else it searches. And secondly, the View as HTML
link was still included, even though google had no idea what format it was, nor how to parse it. If you actually follow that link now, the page contains nothing except for the google branding and diclaimer, that it invalidly puts at the top of every cached and view as HTML page it generates. above any <html> element and/or <!DOCTYPE> in the file.
When will Google learn to start writing valid HTML for all their pages, and when will they support industry standards? I thought that only Internet Exploder was the only user agent lagging behind with standards!
Yeah, but how did I find this blog post in google? I only found out because of the word wrong in ct^’s blog post about it.