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Comment by zb3 | Hacker News Reader

Standards start at Google nowadays..

… And that's clearly a major concern because my front end developer colleagues treat everything that Google does as the one true way of the web. No matter if it is accepted into a standards body, or if the Chrome implementation is buggy, that is their target and every other browser is an after-thought at best.

I think this misses the point. If the vast majority of your users use something Chromium based, that's where you should put most of your effort. It doesn't matter if it's the right way or whatnot, your users only care about whether it works for them or not. Users don't care about the technicalities.

While true and a pragmatic approach, that's another part of the same root problem.

Historically nothing has changed just who’s on top. Mosaic, Netscape, IE, Chrome…

Considering the HTML provided by google dot com has 19 warnings and a Content-Security-Policy error for a page that only has a text field and a logo, I'm gonna take my chances and apply to become a W3C invited expert.

Surely they have pretty good reasons for doing things that way, don't you think?

That page is probably among the top 3 most analyzed, optimized and A/B tested webpages in the world.

That's not my question to answer, though.

Google controls the browser, the page, the CDN, AND to a large extent the very standards that the browser has to comply with.

If what you claim is true, with all of this authority, why can't they write a compliant web page?

That's precisely why it seems likely to be deliberate, they could be playing 3D chess.

It could be a way to keep some kind of competitive edge or some kind of fingerprinting strategy or for some other reason altogether.

> If what you claim is true, with all of this authority, why can't they write a compliant web page?

I'm not sure why you'd think that they "can't" write a compliant web page. It's obvious they can, just like it's obvious they've been paying a bunch of experts top dollars for multiple decades to think about and test what exactly to write in this page's code. It's also obvious they've taken into account the basic fact that every character* they add costs them a measurable amount of money to serve given their scale.

It's therefore pretty obvious that they're deliberately choosing to write a non-compliant web page. Presumably because among the multiple billions of users they serve this page to, a high-enough-to-matter portion is still using old and/or non compliant web browsers and they don't want to cut them out.

* past certain packet length cutoffs

Yeah, everyone apparently failed to learn from IE lesson, and served the Web on a plate to Google.

They even ship Chrome with their applications, because people can't be bothered to learn neither native UI frameworks, nor portable Web standards.

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