Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

Message Too Old, No Replies

Why does Google use a hack to display cached pages?

         

kaled

10:23 am on May 28, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Why does Google place extra HTML at the top of a cached page thereby relying on Browsers to treat this hack favourably but use a good old-fashioned frameset when doing more or less the same thing with image searches?

This makes absolutely no sense to me and is a source of some annoyance since the CSS on my site breaks down horribly when displayed as a cached page (but is fine from an image search).

If you look at how it's done, Google places <div> and other tags before the <html> tag.

Kaled.

tedster

6:15 pm on May 28, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I've long wondered the same thing - there are many kinds of CSS positioning that break Google's cache display. It's got to be a low priority for them. I've seen it discussed on their own webmaster forums, so it's clear that they know about it.

The fact that it's not valid code doesn't matter - they've never been one to worry about validation for their own pages. But that it gives a poor user experience? I am surprised that situation has continued for so very long.

[edited by: tedster at 6:55 pm (utc) on May 28, 2010]

mack

6:35 pm on May 28, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I have often thought about this as well. I don't see why it would be difficult to fix?

Mack.