Poorly Formed and Broken HTML
The search engine spiders are not as forgiving as the major browsers for such things as poorly formed and broken HTML. The reasons are many, but the bottom line is that no one will notice if your site doesn't appear in the search engines. They will notice if they land on your site and it doesn't display properly on a particular browser, such as Firefox. In the first instance, the only person who will notice or care that your site is not in the search engine is you. In the second instance, if I land on many sites and they all display poorly in my browser, I'm going to switch browsers to one that does display properly. This is a powerful incentive for the browsers to attempt to handle broken HTML.
An example of broken HTML might be:
<a rel=”nofollow href=index.php>”Joke”</a>
In this instance, the value for the "rel" parameter does not have a terminating quote (“), so following the W3C definition, the "rel" parameter will be set to “nofollow href=index.php>” which then leaves the anchor <a> without a trailing ">." It also leaves the anchor without an "href" parameter.
W3C is the committee that oversees the various specifications that make the Web possible. In this instance we're talking about the W3C HTML specification which can be located at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/.
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