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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].'"

4 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 Serious+Callers+Only · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?

    2. Re:Why Do They Ignore Their Own Advice? by BZ · · Score: 5, Informative

      > 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...

  2. Revolutionary idea by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have this great and innovative idea. Take your browser-based e-mail client and word processor, rewrite them in native machine code and run them alongside the browser, as a separate app, instead of inside it. For even more speedup, the data could be stored on the hard drive instead of downloaded from a remote web-site. Never seen before!

    --
    My first program:

    Hell Segmentation fault