Popular Sites and validation.

[killerchutney]

Have you ever thought that popular sites such as google and download.com would take care over their pages? Well, through a visual point of view, yes but not through a valid coding point of view. Google.com, does not validate. They have even forgot to use a doctype. And download.com, has over 500 Errors and about 500 more warnings. Yahoo.com is not valid and has no doctype. Has anyone else found such things with big sites?

[Twey]

Yes. Google is aware of the problem, but says it deliberately omits the DOCTYPE in order to save bandwidth. I'm not sure about the others.

[boxxertrumps]

yahoo is bad too...

[mburt]

Most of these forums have alot of JavaScript errors too... what's up with today's website building? :p

[Twey]

It's done in a hurry, and the applications become huge. Javascript isn't a language that lends itself well to the development of large applications.

[jscheuer1]

If you know what you are doing and are willing to update as your target browsers do, you can code just about any old way you like.

[Twey]

Can, yes, but it's not always easy. Languages like Java, C++, C#, or Python have features specifically included to make it easy to develop large applications in a modularised fashion. Javascript has few of these, so as applications get larger, they also become proportionally harder to maintain, and it is quite difficult to successfully assign a team of programmers to appropriate modules. Javascript's object orientation allows a rough approximation of such modularisation to take place, but it's not as easy to implement as features found in other languages, and can become bulky easily.

Once an application becomes monolithic, changing one thing can have unexpected consequences elsewhere, as seen in the frequency with with Windows patches are reported to break things as well as fixing the problems they were intended to address.

[tech_support]

Even DD's site failed validation

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dynamicdrive.com%2F