Brett_Tabke - 11:33 pm on Apr 19, 2001 (gmt 0)

The thing to remember from all of this, is that it is fairly easy to build a indexer to strip down html 3.2 into it's key entities. Although it isn't that much more difficult with 4.0, there are some constructs that have led me to question whether search engines discount for their usage.

In the same vein, Javascript, vbscript, or other client side scripting can be difficult to parse. The trouble isn't with the standards, it is with the liberties browsers and editors have taken. I've seen no less than 12 different formats for embedding JS/VB in code. Off the wall stuff you'd never expect to run. Search engine indexers can stumble on that stuff and throw out or degrade the whole page. It becomes much worse when you think in terms of site templates where you may replicate the code through out the site. There may be a problem with it and you never even know it until 4 months down the road.

I think the biggest single thing you could impress upon anyone is to run their code through a quality (read: w3c) validator. They may want to take some liberties by leaving out alt tags or questionable constructs, but if you can get it close to w3 acceptable, the search engines should be ok with it.