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Google To Promote Web Speed On New Dev Site

Posted by Soulskill on from the patience-no-longer-a-virtue dept.

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].'"

3 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Why Do They Ignore Their Own Advice? by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Most of this is helpful but from the HTML piece:

    HTML - as opposed to XHTML, even when delivered with the MIME type text/html - allows authors to omit certain tags. According to the HTML 4 DTD, you can omit the following tags (tags of so-called "void" - empty - elements are marked as strikethrough):

    • </area>
    • </base>
    • <body>
    • </body>
    • (Void Element) </br>
    • </col>
    • </colgroup>
    • </dd>
    • </dt>
    • <head>
    • </head>
    • (Void Element) </hr>
    • <html>
    • </html>
    • (Void Element) </img>
    • (Void Element) </input>
    • </li>
    • (Void Element) </link>
    • (Void Element) </meta>
    • </option>
    • </p>
    • </param>
    • <tbody>
    • </tbody>
    • </td>
    • </tfoot>
    • </th>
    • </thead>
    • </tr>

    For example, if you have a list of items marked up as <li>List item</li>, you could instead just write <li>List item. Or instead of a paragraph that you'd usually close with via </p>, you could just use <p>My paragraph. This even works with html, head, and body, which are not required in HTML. (Make sure you feel comfortable with this before making it your standard coding practice.)

    Omitting optional tags keeps your HTML formally valid, while decreasing your file size. In a typical document, this can mean 5-20 % savings.

    Now, my first reaction was simply "that cannot be valid!" But, of course, it is. What I found interesting is that when I looked at the source for that tutorial they themselves are using </li> and </p>. Interesting, huh? You would hope that Google would follow the very advice they are trying to give you.

    Some of these suggestions may come at the cost of readability and maintainability. There's something about web pages being nice tidy properly formatted XML documents with proper closing tags that I like.

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Why Do They Ignore Their Own Advice? by gbjbaanb · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The trouble with web pages is that they are source and 'released binary' all in one file, so if you put comments in (as you always should), and meaningful tag and variable names, then your download gets quite bigger.

      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 - so your source files were deployed to the server via this translator, then you'd never even know the difference, except your users on low-bandwidth (ie mobile) devices would love you more.

      We used a primitive one many years ago, but I don't know if there's any improvements to the state of web-page optimisers today.

  2. Re:Some very slow sites: Slashdot and Facebook by WebmasterNeal · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Look at these lovely stats from my Facebook profile:

    Documents (3 files) 7 KB (592 KB uncompressed)
    Images (111 files) 215 KB
    Objects (1 file) 701 bytes
    Scripts (27 files) 321 KB (1102 KB uncompressed)
    Style Sheets (12 files) 69 KB (303 KB uncompressed)
    Total 613 KB (2213 KB uncompressed)

    --
    "During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore