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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!"

18 of 334 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by geekoid · · Score: 2, Funny

    "Webmasters" strike again. Clowns.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    1. Re:Wow by Curtman · · Score: 4, Funny

      I don't claim to know why you have a problem with webmasters (I am not one)

      Probably for the same reason that many other people hate them. They announce themselves to people as being a "webmaster". It's a really stupid title. They don't preform wizardry. If I can't at least be a "codemaster", and maybe our plumber gets to be called a "pipemaster", then we'll continue to mock anyone who uses the word. Oooh, "plungemaster". I think he'd go for that.
    2. Re:Wow by Jonboy+X · · Score: 3, Funny

      Webmonkey?

      --

      "In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
  2. The Solution by OdieWan · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have a solution to the problem; I wrote it down at http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd !

    1. Re:The Solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Don't click that link! It's some sort of ascii pornography!

  3. Do what.... by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 5, Funny

    Do what any other respectable web provider would do..

    Put links to Goatse in the definitions!

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  4. Leave it to Slashdot... by PocketPick · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's a good we don't contribute to the problem - Oh, wait...

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
                            "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
    <html>
    <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

    <title>Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters</title>

  5. Who designed this crazy system?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Isn't this what you call "eating your own dogfood"?

  6. Simple solution by mcrbids · · Score: 5, Funny

    The answer to this problem is quite easy.

    Continue to host the data referenced on a single T-1 line. That will cut your expenses to the bone since you'll never exceed 1.54 Mbps and that should be quite cheap. And, any dumfuxorz who fubarred their parser to not cache these basically static values will probably figure it out... very quickly.

    You don't have to leave it on the T-1, maybe just 1 month out of the year. Every year.

    Problem solved!

    --
    I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
  7. WARNING: GNAA by SirBudgington · · Score: 2, Funny

    Don't click the link, it's malware.

    --
    this is my sig
  8. Irony by davburns · · Score: 4, Funny

    So, w3c complains about their bandwidth, and the response is: The Slashdot Effect. Doesn't that make the old bandwidth problem seem less of a problem?

    I'm just loving the irony in that.

  9. Such an easy solution by mwasham · · Score: 5, Funny

    And it is only 4 articles down.. Host with Yahoo! Yahoo Offers All-You-Can-Eat Storage and Bandwidth http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/08/1811236

  10. Submitted this to /.? by dotancohen · · Score: 5, Funny

    Great, they cry "we get too much traffic", so we go ahead and slap them on the front page of slashdot. Sick, sick fucking joke.

    --
    It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
  11. Starting on the 1st, fool by Scrameustache · · Score: 5, Funny

    You don't have to leave it on the T-1, maybe just 1 month out of the year. Every year. I suggest April! :D
    --

    You can't take the sky from me...

  12. Re:Delay by dotancohen · · Score: 4, Funny

    You must be a Microsoft engineer.

    --
    It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
  13. Re:Umm, no. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    It's the whole design of HTML/XML, that needs to have DTD files in the first place to do the processing

    At least what little code I've written to process HTML/XML has always entirely ignored the DTD.

    Either you have the super-human power to defy the laws of logic, or the word "need" does not mean what you think it means.
  14. Hey, for once... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... you can't blame Microsoft for this problem! After all, IE ignores pretty much all web standards and best practices, and does its own thing!

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  15. What's their website URN, anyway? by Prototerm · · Score: 3, Funny

    Nothing, it's a non-profit.

    (ducks and runs)

    --
    "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)