Comments on: If the web was smaller

By: Jason Huck

Jason Huck — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:52:32 +0000

Think how much better many sites could be at describing the structure and hierarchy of their contents to user agents, if only they used more appropriate markup, instead of relying on so many generic div’s for everything…

By: Daniel

Daniel — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:38:14 +0000

@micho, you are completely right for every 2 characters there should be 4 bytes. However I worked that out on an average of the top 5 websites. My calculations may not be that accurate.

By: micho

micho — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:32:36 +0000

hello can someone pleas explain this:

“For every element that would be converted to a , on average 5.93 bytes are saved.”

div – d = 2
\div – d = 2

= 4 bytes

So when i replace i only get 4 bytes, not 5.93, what am i doing wrong?

By: Paul Davis

Paul Davis — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:09:46 +0000

Easy to do (though the real benefit is up for debate).
Send your pages as XML, use XSLT to transform the d’s to div’s on the client. If you’re doing that, you might as well shortcut all of your tags at the same time….

By: Alex Forrow

Alex Forrow — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:59:03 +0000

The vast majority of requests are from browsers that support gzipping. The great thing about the HTTP protocol is that the browser specifies whether it can accept gzipping when it makes the request, so unsupporting browsers can continue as normal.

Grabbing XML is no different, just use a client library that supports gzip. Sometimes its nice to be able to talk standard text for simple apps, but relatively thats a tiny amount of traffic.

As for CPU usage, in most cases the the benefits of bandwidth savings outweigh the problems of using extra cycles.

I’m not saying gzipping should be mandatory, but more widespread web server support would save a fair amount of bandwidth.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:52:24 +0000

@BTM I wouldn’t agree that using 127 divs is a sign that you don’t know what you are doing many sites have a lot of content, or even a lot of round corners.

The fact is image how much space you would save in the entire Internet if all the div’s were converted into d’s.

By: BTM

BTM — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:45:55 +0000

Oh, and as for Jared’s example, gziping things that are still :

[root@~] curl -s http://www.youtube.com/ | gzip | wc -c
13022

So thats 123 bytes saved .. not that much really …

By: BTM

BTM — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:42:25 +0000

I cant agree on the “gziping should be enforced” part. First, you’ve said yourself that not every brwoser supports it. True. And remember that not only browsers are used to browse the Net, but sometimes you’ve got to fetch XML, pocke a hole in some sockets etc. Then both you and the server has to spend time (read: CPU cycles) gziping/ungziping the data and I can bet the time spent on that is far greater than sending another 1k bytes.

And the “127 div’s for page” is absurd. 127 divs is a sign of :

a) something way to big – like yahoo – how many sites like yahoo have YOU written? :>
b) someone who dosn’t have any idea what he’s doing – I usually get sites done in ~20 div’s, rest goes in and the other bunch. Can’t shorten

By: james wilson

james wilson — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:41:34 +0000

not convinced those savings are remotely worth it to be honest……

By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:18:09 +0000

Yeah, gzipping should be enforced. It would be a lot better and more efficient.