I’ve never used Google+. This article is solely based on me reading other sources.

The word ”open” is often used by Google, and even more often by Google’s proponents, as an argument for why Google and their products are better than others (especially better than Apple, but occasionally Microsoft). In my opinion though that has always been about business strategy and marketing, not ideology (and that’s fine). Google is a company that wants to make money and there is nothing wrong with that. This is not going to be an Apple fanboy’s assault on Google. It’s going to be reflecting on the not so open world of Google+ and a concerned look at some of the not-so-great-in-fact-really-bad things about Google+ and it’s lack of ”openness”.

The semantics

The HTML of Google+ is an absolute nightmare. It’s <div> in <div> in <div> in <div> (repeat indefinitely). And the class names makes no semantic sense what so ever. On episode #32 of Build and Analyze Marco Arment speculates that this could be because the code itself is actually written in a higher level language and compiled into the HTML that makes up the page. That may be the case, but it’s still a complete disregard of everything that the Web Standards-people and the Microformats community (and others) have fought for over the years.

Semantics and well-structured HTML that validates can easily become a religion. Breaking these dogmas is not a problem for the sake of it. It’s a problem because it partially locks down the content on Google+ and makes it harder for parsers and crawlers to do something meaningful with it. Instapaper for instance had to have a completely specialized parsing algorithm written for it (again Build and Analyze #32). One of the main purposes of the new elements in HTML5 was to give developers simpler tool to mark up content in a way that makes sense semantically. Google has previously made a big deal about HTML5 so why not follow its semantics as well?

URL from hell

The urls for peoples pages on Google+ is horrible. People are identified by a long string of digits, not by a username or anything that’s easily rememberable. In practice this means that the most popular way to find people’s Google+ sites is likely to use Google Search to find them. Thereby Google, who makes its money from advertising, gets yet another chance to show you its ads.

With a bit of a tin-foil hat-mind this could be seen as a slightly anticompetitive move, but there are other search engines too, right?

Everything is a JavaScript

Every single part of the content of a Google+ page is generated with javascript. This is unfortunately not something unique; Twitter does it, I think Facebook does it etc. However, just because you are in good company does not mean you’re doing the right thing. Here’s some reasons why javascript-generated content is bad:

• Javascript is likely present on almost all browsers that surf the web today, but there is no guarantee that it’s activated. Any browser that has javascript deactivated will be unable to use the service. This is really, really bad practice. (Again, Google is definitely not the only company that does this mistake.)

  So how many people does this really affect?

  According to an analysis by Yahoo, performed in October 2010, about 1% of the visitors to Yahoo’s services have javascript disabled. Among Americans the number was around 2%. While both these numbers are pretty low, the internet has a lot of users and a small percentage of really big number is still a big number.

• Even if you have a browser that supports javascript and you have it enabled, there is still the risk that one tiny bug in the code makes the entire site useless. I don’t think this is much of a risk in this case, but when prominent web companies do things contrary to best practice other people, companies and organizations will likely follow.

• Javascript generated content makes it hard for crawlers, spiders and robots to scan the content. This means (according to Marco, again on B&A #32) that the traditional crawlers used by search engines will not be able to index the content of Google+. Google Search however will have full access to the content since it’s all under Google’s roof.

  Now this point means the tin-foil hat does not need to be that big to suspect that Google is using + to promote its own services by making it harder for their competitors.

End game

I want to once again state that this is not an Apple Fanboy’s rant against a threat to the all mighty fruit, it’s a web developer who’s concerned about some of the directions being taken by one of the largest web companies in the world, and one that explicitly uses the word open time after time to tout its own greatness.