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From Shadowfax

Technology is great. Especially technology that doesn't feel like technology. Things that lower the bar to make life easier for the unitiated. On that score, Google Sites ought to be brilliant. It takes a lot of the pain out of creating a website for people who really don't know how to.

The problem is that making things easy is actually quite hard to achieve. Look at Myspace. It opened the door to a lot on non-techies having a web presence. But at what cost? Loads of slow loading, ugly pages, jammed full of errors to break most browsers.

You'd think with Google's advice to web designers about how to produce speedy, standards compliant html that sites might be different. Sadly, however, it seems that Google have cut a lot of corners. The user interface is relative simplicity - it is straightforward for someone to put together a site quite quickly with a standard template. But try to get it looking just how you want and the cracks begin to show. Because Google is ignoring its own advice. The HTML generated by google sites is a dog's breakfast of unecessary tags and in-line style elements. It doesn't validate on any validation tool. It increases page weight unecessarily to achieve pointless things. It doesn't let you achieve simple things you might want to.

Google sites needs a way to deal with CSS - and it needs it quickly. In the mean-time, give me a wiki any day!