a comment on the “quoting” issue from Julio Nobrega.
Googles pages don’t conform to any standard. sure Googles pages work well, but they use a tiny subset of html for each page, there’s nothing “fancy” about googles output.
For a website that hope to be supported on a wider range of devices and browsers, while utilizing more features of css, javascript and html, not following the w3c’s recommendations is dangerous.

Alex suggests following the XHTML guidelines, and this in itself can speed up page rendering because an xhtml browser doesn’t need to respond to such a wide range of formats and styles, it knows that a tagname is all lowercase, all attributes are quoted and all tags are explicitly closed and properly nested. Just to name a few of the xhtml rules. This also means that a wider range of applications like cellphones and other wap devices will be able render pages with smaller parser engines because they don’t need to have fancy functions like strtolower or trying to figure out when a attribute value ends that’s not quoted.

If google used external css, they would save more bandwidth and speed up page rending far more than their omission of quotes, especially if their css was delivered with the proper caching and length headers. As it would be cached on the client’s computer the first time it was loaded, and subsequent requests would only require checking the headers.
further, they could probably have reduced their need for attributes with better use of css. For example: all their tables contain information that could have been removed in favor of css alternatives, and they use font tags (which are deprecated) extensively.

standards have been developed for a reason, and if the browser developers held rigid to standards, pages would render significantly faster, the browser’s themselves would be smaller and faster. However pages like google, and many others would all fail to display. Encouraging poor coding practice is a shortsighted plecibo for a much bigger problem.