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W3C Gets Excessive DTD Traffic
eldavojohn writes "It's a common string you see at the start of an HTML document, a URI declaring the type of document, but that is often processed causing undue traffic to W3C's site. There's a somewhat humorous post today from W3.org that seems to be a cry for sanity and asking developers and people to stop building systems that automatically query this information. From their post, 'In particular, software does not usually need to fetch these resources, and certainly does not need to fetch the same one over and over! Yet we receive a surprisingly large number of requests for such resources: up to 130 million requests per day, with periods of sustained bandwidth usage of 350Mbps, for resources that haven't changed in years. The vast majority of these requests are from systems that are processing various types of markup (HTML, XML, XSLT, SVG) and in the process doing something like validating against a DTD or schema. Handling all these requests costs us considerably: servers, bandwidth and human time spent analyzing traffic patterns and devising methods to limit or block excessive new request patterns. We would much rather use these assets elsewhere, for example improving the software and services needed by W3C and the Web Community.' Stop the insanity!"
Hey, you made the specs. Why should you blame me if I'm conforming? Does the spec allow me to assume that all my documents are going to use that DTD, and that it won't change?
What to do, what to do...
Just admit you're wrong. Claiming you don't understand the proof that you're wrong is weak.
The W3C created this problem. They insulted people that did not place their advertisement at the top of the page. I know three web programmers that were fired because of the W3C zealots. Now the problem they created is coming back to bite them. That's good. Maybe next time they'll think twice before screwing over the people that make web sites.