[Tutor] << operator ? [left bitwise shifting]

[Erik Price]

On Friday, April 12, 2002, at 06:43  AM, alan.gauld@bt.com wrote:

>> have you ever looked at the source code for Google pages?
>> Very little whitespace, no verbosity at all.  It's like
>> the opposite of XML
>
> Correct. Google is very popular because its fast. One
> reason its fast it they optimise the HTML they send
> so it doesn't hog bandwith sending unnecessary bytes.
>
> Its a trait I commend to web designers everywhere!

Oh, I don't know if I could agree to that!  (Of course, we can agree to 
disagree :)  I'm a firm believer in making sure that a web page is 
standards-compliant -- in the long run, it makes everyone happy.  If 
your pages take too long to download over 14k bps modem, then remove 
some Flash or some graphics, or consider chunking your content into 
separate pages.

Optimizing HTML has its place (for high-volume search engines like 
Google it is a necessity), but for most web pages, standards compliant 
code is perfectly fine and easier to read as well!  I believe it is a 
similar argument to the one made for writing clean and well-organized 
code.  (If browsers were more strict, then more web pages would be 
analogous to Python scripts -- properly nested tags, appropriately 
quoted attributes, etc.)

As far as XML is concerned, I am very interested but agree 
wholeheartedly that it's not really the best transmission format for Joe 
User (but for LANs it seems to be sufficient).  Of course, I'm no expert 
or anything.


Erik