Gruber on Google’s AdSense HTML code

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Technology
September 12th, 2003 • 5:29 pm

John Gruber shares his experience with using Google’s AdSense program and more specifically with the HTML code provided by Google.

He notes that:

It’s rather incongruous to see a company as clever as Google writing such embarrassingly bad markup (although not necessarily surprising, since their markup for Google.com is similarly utterly non-standards-compliant).

I couldn’t agree more. When I was using UserLand’s Radio for my blog, I didn’t have a search engine, so I had to make do with the free WebSearch service provided by Google to webmasters.

Here’s a sample of the kind of code provided by this service (which you are supposed to cut and paste INTO your own web page markup):

 <!-- Search Google -->
 <center>
 <FORM method=GET action=http://www.google.com/custom>
 <TABLE bgcolor=#FFFFFF cellspacing=0 border=0>
 <tr valign=top><td>
 <A HREF=http://www.google.com/search>
 <IMG SRC=http://www.google.com/logos/Logo_40wht.gif border=0 ALT=Google align=middle></A>
 </td>

Etc. It’s atrocious code! They don’t even use quotation marks for the tag attributes!

How a company that focuses so much on efficiency and code slimness can be so backward when it comes to standards compliance is beyond me. It’s one of the great mysteries surrounding this company.


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