Google versus Microsoft

Now that headline probably caught your attention. Nevertheless, the content is not quite as exciting, but it's nonetheless a funny and somewhat ironic observation that I made and that I want to share with you.

A couple of days ago I watched a webcast from the Google I/O developer days where Aaron Boodman from Google talked about standards and HTML 5.0 in Google Gears.

After watching it, I decided to do a little experiment and the expected results differed from those I actually got. I used the W3C Validator to check both MSN and Google to see whether the pages are valid according to the HTML standard.

It comes as a little surprise that the minimalistic Google.com fails validation with 59 errors, while Microsoft's (often regarded as the poster child of not following web standards) MSN is a valid XHTML page.

I am not going to moralise about it, nor will I preach about standards or analyze the results, I just thought it might lighten up your day as an "interesting fact nobody needs to know".

Oh and by the way... you better don't check this blog with the W3C Validator... and if you do: I am using Google's blog service so it's not my fault, I promise :-)