Molly Holzschlag recently wrote about major search engines and their lack of support for web standards.

Well, recently a small group of us Yahoo! Europe web developers sat around in a room talking about the semantic structure of the new Search product now being developed. We call this type of session a code preliminary, and I'll write more about this process later.

There was no argument that it would have semantic things such a sensible header structure, the absolute minimum of markup necessary to achieve the design. We didn't even consider that we would use something other than an ordered list for the results. We did argue for a while over other features, such as how to markup the 'advanced' search areas, and features off to the side such as weather results for the area. But the basics were obvious.

Of course, it's very easy for me to brag about how semantic our code is going to be. It's very easy to talk about an ideal world, but that's how we always approach every new site. Obviously, things will more than likely get clouded during development, as site specifications change and you are left with orphaned semantics, or the design takes precedence over the code. But we hope to bring out something any standardista would be pleased with.

In the words of Shaw Taylor, "keep 'em peeled."