Category Archives: Google

Google related products and services.

GMail GSpot

Google, Personal

I have some GMail invites if anyone wants one. I have 5 left at the moment, but I’ll probably get more soon enough. If you want one, leave a comment or send me an email to <lachyhunt@gmail.com> with the subject “[GSpot] Invite Me”.

On another note, I have decided to start an experement. I want to see how long it can take to fill up a whole Gigabyte worth of SPAM!!! The email address is <spam.my.gspot@gmail.com>. Feel free to spam it, or distribute it to anyone or any website you feel like. I’m aiming to fill it within a year — that doesn’t seem too unreasonable, I think I can manage it.

So, come on! Get involved and get in touch with my GSpot!

application/xhtml+xml+google = File Format: Unrecognized

Google, MarkUp, Standards

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!