Just quickly, speaking in Google's favour, I've had to use Gmail in an emergency via SSH on a text terminal, and it remained eminently usable. Screenreaders may not fare so well, but for the vast majority of users, it's key strength is usability and the depth of their products. It seems they value usability over (universal) accessibility, which is, for many businesses, quite an acceptable order of values.
You can either devote resources to ensuring accessibility for those clients who may or may not be the most profitable, or you can devote the same resources to improving usability for the widest possible range of people... which drives the growth of their products in no small way. And, despite all its validation misdemeanours, Google's search engine linearises quite well (if you don't believe me, fire up Links... which I presume is a decent guide to the way a screen reader would approch things). Hah! I just discovered something that puts an interesting spin on my previous assertion about Google not worrying about showing up in search engines. Try this search: http://www.google.com/search?q=search Yes indeed, Google ranks after MSN in its own search engine! Josh On 12/8/05, Bert Doorn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > G'day > > > Well, it isn't the first thing that occurred to me! > > I've often wondered why it is that Google doesn't validate. > > I never looked at it closely, but you're right - it's tagsoup, > tables for layout and deprecated elements and attributes galore > (font, center anyone?). No DTD either. > > Perhaps, like *many* businesses, they look at it and say "it > works in all browsers, so what's all the fuss about?" They don't > *see* the need... > > Perhaps it's also a case of "(some) programmers are not html > coders". It seems many people who write server side scripts only > have a vocabulary of about 10-12 HTML elements (html, title, > meta, body, table, tr, td, center, font, img and maybe a couple > more). > > Yes, I know there are exceptions... Just thinking Google may > fall into this category as it's obviously script driven. > > Regards > -- > Bert Doorn, Better Web Design > http://www.betterwebdesign.com.au/ > Fast-loading, user-friendly websites > > ****************************************************** > The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ > > See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm > for some hints on posting to the list & getting help > ****************************************************** > > -- Joshua Street http://www.joahua.com/ +61 (0) 425 808 469 ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
