On Thu, Dec 07, 2006 at 11:25:38AM +1000, Scott Barnes wrote: > On 12/6/06, Ryan Sabir <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > How many of you are developing sites in XHTML these days? Is it > > worth the extra effort? > > SOE is supposedly the ducks nuts as to why. Yet, you'd have to be a > moron to expect Google to differentiate between XHTML vs HTML as in > the end, content is the one commodity google and co want initially. > > I've read many a debate on it, but in the end the browsers are smart > enough and will continue to evolve to the fact that tag prediction and > differentiating between Style vs Semantically Correct tagging has > probably become a moot point these days and usually reserved for the > HTML purists out there.
I'll throw in my purist $0.02 here, and no doubt regret having done so (I usually do). I've not yet read an informed point of view that argued that Google And Friends *bias* their scoring systems towards XHTML, or even valid HTML. If you've got a link, I'd appreciate the chuckle. I think there's little doubt though that they would like to extract all possible content from whatever document you publish and classify it as best they can. The argument tends to be more along the lines that an automatic process is *better able* to extract and classify content from valid, well-formed HTML that follows a known set of rules. XHTML is better yet again because of the increased signal-to-noise ratio. Semantically correct markup simply conveys more information about the document contents. No doubt there'll be a number of different experiences from those on this list arguing for and against this conjecture. This seems to be the nature of the heavy wizardry of SEO. However my own intuition is that the search engines whose algorithms do not currently use semantic markup to better classify content could only justify this with that argument that there's not enough content out there which is semantically organized. You'd have to be a moron to think that they wouldn't make use of this extra information to improve their indexing and categorization, in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their product. ;) -T --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "cfaussie" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cfaussie?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
