Google To Promote Web Speed On New Dev Site

CWmike writes "Google has created a Web site for developers that is focused exclusively on making Web applications, sites and browsers faster. The site will allow developers to submit ideas, suggestions and questions via a discussion forum and by using Google's Moderator tool. Google hopes developers will join it in improving core online technologies such as HTML and TCP/IP. For Google, a prime example of how Web performance can be enhanced is the development of HTML 5, which provides a major improvement in how Web applications process Javascript, Google believes. 'We're hoping the community will spend some time on the basic protocols of the Internet,' Google product manager Richard Rabbat said. 'There's quite a bit of optimization that can be done [in that area].'"

Comments

Re:Why Do They Ignore Their Own Advice?

[Serious Callers Only]

What you really need is a system to 'compile' the source pages to something less readable, but significantly smaller - removing comments, replacing the unneeded end tags, shortening the variable names. If that was automated...

Something like gzip compression perhaps?

Re:Why Do They Ignore Their Own Advice?

[BZ]

> The price of downloading html and javascript source is peanuts compared to images and
> flash animations

That may or may not be true... Last I checked, a number of popular portal sites (things like cnn.com) included scripts totaling several hundred kilobytes as part of the page. The problem is that unlike images those scripts prevent the browser from doing certain things while the script is downloading (because you never know when that 200kb script you're waiting on will decide to do a document.write and compeletely change what you're supposed to do with all the HTML that follows it). So the cost of downloading scripts is _very_ palpable...