Molly has done a study of the major Search Engines to see how Standards Compliant they are – and to the amazement of me, at least, the only Search Engine which comes in as Standards Compliant is MSN Search!
MSN Search is fully XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant!
Who’da thunk it? Kudos to the MSN Search team – maybe their example will spur on others at Microsoft (like the Start.com team, for example!).
Rather amusing since MS browsers do not support one of the very basic XHTML 1.0 requirements – namely accepting the application/xhtml+xml MIME type. XHTML is good in that it encourages better code (if it validates) and I use it pretty much everywhere but thats by personal choice and I am aware of the problems with using it: See http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml for more details.
Funny … I actually looked at the web sites for the top 10 companies in Ireland, and only 1 of them passed ALL standards tests … Microsoft!!! (Dell were one of the worst).