-5 for simply a cheap intro -- you disagree with it, therefore it's a troll. I disagree with you, so I suppose that makes your post a troll.
M$ have hooked the two together, via global variables and functions to the point where the one cannot exist with out the other. This is not code reuse this is bad design, and infact the oppersite of structured programming, which is the basis of real code reuse.
-3 for using the unbelievably dated and juvenile "M$". Secondly, you're so obviously uninformed and with nary a clue of the "Windows world" that the fact that you are so willing to proclaim your ignorance (albeit indirectly) is disturbing.
Every modern operating system (which isn't the pedantic 2nd year CS pedantic definition of operating system) has a method to render HTML. Microsoft, pursuing code reuse, took this further and utilized the shared code for elements such as the help system (which is entirely based around the IE renderer). It is integrated because the code reuse made sense.
You really don't know the first thing about coding do you...blah blah blah...most programs would only need you to update the dynamic library on your system
This was, which was stunningly obvious, exactly his point -- most code should be using dynamic libraries (which is code re-use, such as the re-use of the IE libraries that you "outed" as incompetence above). The problem is that lots of code isn't using dynamic libraries, or are reinventing the wheel. This whole issue was the question of "why would IE break 3rd party applications?" when you yourself answered the question "because they use the shared libraries, and thus are fragile if it is fragile".
I guess you missed the bit where zlib (not gzip) code was in all manner of Microsoft products
Most Windows applications use zlib.dll, or variants: One central file with an honoured contract entry-point API, and one single binary build. When zlib had a problem, that one single location is the only place that needed to be replaced. Exactly as the author pointed out -- that is proper code re-use. The downside is that obviously if you break the contract, or expose a new bug (or fix a bug, err, behaviour that people relied upon) then that one file fix can break many applications.
The alternative are applications that basically copy the code from zlib into their own application, faults and all. In that case, when a problem appears in zlib it's not one file that needs to be replaced, but possibly hundreds (each with an individual effort of locating the variant of the bug, replacing, rebuilding, and redistributing). That is an archaic, largely obsolete method of software development.
Microsoft uses just as much Open Source code as any Linux project.
I'm sorry, did I order an extra-large serving of hyperbole? How absurd of a statement.
You know after I wrote that original post I contemplated posting a followup about PageRank - What I had intended to say was that PageRank, which is a published algorithm (possibly patented...too lazy to check), is a very small part of how they rank sites. While there is a general understanding of PageRank, as you rightly noted, Google is very closed lipped about the other machinations that dictate how results are ordered, and those other algorithms have become much more important than PageRank.
If Google released their source code, then yes, evil people could find loopholes and exploit them to artificially boost their rankings... but non-evil people, finding those same loopholes, could work out how to close the loopholes and submit the changes back for inclusion in the running code base. The end result? A better search engine.
Actually your description sounds more like "a constant battle for the status quo" rather than "a better search engine". Of course I think you're tremendously understating the motivation of those who want to exploit loopholes (it is a _huge_ $ business, and one's ranking on Google is of tremendous economic consequence in many businesses), while overstating those who would want to close the loopholes (most people don't have a fat pipe, er the network kind, that allows them to "Scratch their own search itch" and run their own search engine. As such, it's unlikely that there's going to be large ranks of benevolent free programmers scouring through the Google code, apart from a passing curiousity).
Google's "democratic" page ranking techniques, a part of which is called PageRankTM(C), are unknown entities -- the most we know about how Google ranks pages is based upon trial and error, observations, and some basics like "links from powerful sites improve your ranking". This is intentional as Google wants to avoid sites "stuffing the ballot box", if you will.
If "Search Engine Optimizers" had the source code for Google, it would be a "arms race" of SEOs battling to perfectly match whatever search boosting criteria Google uses - perhaps it wants a certain page churn, or URL length and content, or certain word choices, etc.
If you're running a site that is serving up static "Coming Soon" type pages, rather than a dynamic high-availability type site, there is absolutely no doubt that an Apache/Linux box would be the best choice (really there are even lighter choices -- even a basic install of Apache is quite heavy for such a task)
Note: Before someone goes apeshit, horribly offended that I've implied that Apache is a lesser product, note that that is not what I stated -- my claim is moreso that Apache scales _down_ much further than IIS (down meaning cheaper and more lightweight), though it scales up just as high as IIS.
Don't we have a good-sized "global economy" going on, these days? Turn it around, since the job was outsourced, how many hundreds of programmers in India were able to eat and feed their families? Isn't India one of the more poverty-stricken places in the world?
Your point on globalism made sense up until you portray global trade as some sort of charity. Global trade, in the long term, means that India, much like other evolving nations (although India is a massive exception in that it has a large population that can speak English quite well, as well as a very advanced educational system), will improve their standard of living such that they're buying goods and services from "the West", maintaining or improving the quality of living in the West as well (because the world economy isn't a zero sum game -- many people have foolishly come to believe this because it's been beaten into them that we should feel guilty in the West for consuming all of the world's "wealth", as if it was being done on the backs of the world's poor. This belief betrays a massive lack of understanding of basic economics). Of course at the outset there is a bit of a shock as things balance out and adjust, such that we've seen in IT (though Indian wages have been absolutely skyrocketing).
A Patriot says "Buy the best shit" because the Patriot knows that if your economy is focused on buying the best shit, and they want to survive, they will also produce the best shit.
If only world economics were so simple that it's all about the most cost-effective and best-quality.
How do things like environmental laws come into play? Company A goes out of business in Iowa because of extensive environmental requirements making plastic products more expensive (all of the contamination removal, etc), while they're being undercut by Company B, located in the middle of China, that can just pump it all into the local river. Have you noticed that about 95% of the plastic goods at the local Walmart are made in China? How about the fact that China has pegged their currency to the US dollar basically for the sole purpose of undercutting US trade (the Chinese currency doesn't float like almost all other currencies. I'm too lazy to check, but I believe that India is playing this little trick as well).
Don't wanna be competitive? Then we likely don't need you in the gene pool any more.:)
Most of this article was not about working from home, but rather about simply tearing down the cube walls and ensuring that every worker knows that they're just a temporary cog - you still have to drive there to work in the cafeteria.
Having said that, given how much of an information age we are in it is absolutely imperative that policies and initiatives are pursued to encourage and support distributed working (i.e. working at home). I live in the Toronto area, and it is absurd how much of the road infrastructure is there just so people can drive 80km to work, click on a keyboard for 8 hours, and then drive 80km home.
There are arguements for having devs in work, because people fear they might be slacking off, but the proof is in the pudding!
Any organization that has no metrics (such as deliverables, designs, progress on projects, documents, etc. Note that I'm talking about progress-not ridiculous metrics like keystrokes per hour) other than watching from the surveillance tower, is doomed: There is absolutely nothing stopping workers from slacking off right under your eyes.
No sane browser will be at all fazed by whitespace. It seems unlikely that it consumes a noticeable amount of processor.
No sane browser will be at all fazed by tables, or by inline CSS, but strangely this whole article is entirely about changing the same.
The point was not that it's an appreciable amount of processor time, or that clients are rotting away waiting for their browser to parse whitespaces, but simply that it's counter-intuitive to add them -- for the person who thinks that it somehow helps the browser, the comment was that no it doesn't (the first step in rendering is to filter out such crud).
The whitespace adds 3% to the size of the HTML...It's also a godawful mess...You've got to remember that gzip is very good at compressing repeated data, e.g. long runs of whitespace.
To hit the final point first-- that it's a "godawful mess"-- how often do you pull up the source to Slashdot? Apart from this article, I never do, as I would guess is the case for the overwhelming majority of readers. That "mess", by the way, is absolutely perfect HTML (just because you can't parse it doesn't make it a mess when the intended receipient is the browser).
The majority of sites do not use gzip on dynamic content (because it's very "resource intensive"...running one gzip command might be quick, but with thousands of incoming connections it can quickly become overwhelming). Ignoring that, let's remember that sites like Slashdot yield millions of hits - in a given month several years ago it was 50 million per month. So presuming that every client accepted gzip (which they don't), that's 15GB to serve up extraneous whitespace. So in the end let's recap what we've achieved:
-Added time to development to ensure that our page generator properly tabs each section
-Added time to runtimes as the string builder iterates through and adds whitespaces
-Added time to gzip as it builds a dictionary of spaces and tabs
-Added time and quantity to transfer as extraneous whitespaces will always yield a larger file with any non-broken compression algorithm
-Added time on the client end to render the page
Why? So that when someone who misunderstands xhtml does a page source view they don't perceive it as a "mess". Regardless of how minimal each of the above is, it seems like nothing but waste.
Note: I'm not religious about this, and personally I couldn't care less what Slashdot's bandwidth bill is, but it just fascinates me how people will go to such lengths for something that is overwhelmingly negative, all under the flawed perception that it achieves some sort of purity of HTML.
Could it be that PEOPLE WANT TO SHARE THEIR BANDWITH?!!!
Highly, highly, highly doubtful. While I certainly can't claim to have done exhaustive studies (or even "asked some dude what he thinks" studies...), I would guess that the vast majority of them simply are clueless about how open their network is, or if they are aware it's more likely open because it's an inconvenience to bother toggling a bit or setting up MAC addresses. Most people have a belief that whatever happens out there, it happens to other people, so someone remorah'ing their connection isn't a possibility.
"4. Top ten lists usually forget about the distant past - and only mention items that the reasership is familliar with. Like the list of important historical events that fails to mention items before 1950."
I love when radio stations do the "top 100 pop song of all time" type countdowns, and amazingly about 92 of the songs are from the prior two years.
Your sarcasm is quite out of place. Let me explain the use of quotation marks in the context of the grand-parent comment.
"no one" - This is quoted because directly following it, and as the exception, I'm humanizing the browser.
"readable" - Directly relating to the prior point, I've humanized the browser and am stating that it's reading the HTML, yet obviously it really isn't.
"mechanically generated" - While indeed this is literally correct, most people correlate mechanical with gears and cogs and big machines.
"source-code" - Most developers have an issue calling HTML code.
Excellent point on mod_gzip. One thing to note is that you get a double-whammy with excess whitespaces when using mod_gzip - not only will the final result still be larger (albeit to a greatly decreased degree), mod_gzip (which is a tool that is heavily resource intensive, which is why most sites don't use it) had to spend time processing whitespaces-instead of wasting bandwidth, your wasting processor time.
But this article itself is intended to be read by developers, and clarity counts.
Definitely agree, but the use of such whitespaces is so prevalent that it is likely the suggested "source" format.
Whitespace isn't going to be your biggest bandwidth waster
True enough, but you don't always have to take on the biggest foe first - whitespace is one of those things that was actually intentionally added (it was more work to cleanly whitespace), so it would actually be less work to have skipped it.
Why don't you measure it and compare it to other optimizations before you recommend that people spend their time changing it?
Slashdot serves up millions of pages a day. One useless tab is several MB of Slashdot's bandwidth for absolutely no, or little, gain. I don't need to measure it (and, quite simply, I don't care enough too, though if someone wants to they can grab the tidy utility from the W3C, which strips out whitespace) to see that there is considerable waste in there. In the grand scheme of things it really isn't that much of a hit, but given that it was work to add it...
This is the classic response to that comment (about wasteful whitespace), yet I don't buy it.
a) Totally guessing, but about 99.9999% of the pages served up are interpreted by "no one" other than the browser. It's more "readable" by the browser minus the whitespace.
b) Most pages, like this, is "mechanically generated" - What you see in the final results was rendered: It isn't the "source-code". As such there is absolutely no code maintenance issues.
What you're left with is the prospect that maybe one out of every million page hits is going to a Slashdot developer who's debugging that the rendered properly, though if it's XHTML transitional then a XML editor would be a great choice and would again make it irrelevant if it's clogged full of waste whitespace.
In any case, I've looked at the final example (the "optimized" page), and while it's nice to see someone pushing for the adoption of `cutting edge' (as of 1999) CSS, how about eliminating all of the completely wasteful, bandwidth and processor consuming, whitespace? Unless this is python at whitespace affects scope (which it isn't), I don't see why so many sites have such a fetish with tabbed and spaced HTML when the browser discards it as garbage bytes, actually wasting time (albeit a tiny amount, but nonetheless) parsing through it.
People can't unilaterally toss laws out the window when it's self-serving to do so (although this is the reality that many Slashdotters try to portray). If this were the case then you'd better get your shotgun because hello anarchy...what's this "grocery store" charing _money_ of all things for _food_, man? I need food, so I'm just going to take it. Etc.
While obviously there is a bit of hyperbole in your statement (I highly doubt there are many systems defined as "supercomputers" that consume less than 3 digits or so of kW...certainly not 400-500W that a worst case enthusiast consumes), I really wonder if home computing has really gotten that much worse. Around 11 years ago I remember getting a 350W power supply for my 386-33 (with Diamond Speedstar 24x!), and this was pretty much par for the course - of course the CPU itself consumed much less power (I think around 5W) than some of the high end CPUs (that can consume up to 80W), however the board and surrounding hardware generally consumed a lot more power then.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm who modded this troll up
-5 for simply a cheap intro -- you disagree with it, therefore it's a troll. I disagree with you, so I suppose that makes your post a troll.
M$ have hooked the two together, via global variables and functions to the point where the one cannot exist with out the other. This is not code reuse this is bad design, and infact the oppersite of structured programming, which is the basis of real code reuse.
-3 for using the unbelievably dated and juvenile "M$". Secondly, you're so obviously uninformed and with nary a clue of the "Windows world" that the fact that you are so willing to proclaim your ignorance (albeit indirectly) is disturbing.
Every modern operating system (which isn't the pedantic 2nd year CS pedantic definition of operating system) has a method to render HTML. Microsoft, pursuing code reuse, took this further and utilized the shared code for elements such as the help system (which is entirely based around the IE renderer). It is integrated because the code reuse made sense.
You really don't know the first thing about coding do you...blah blah blah...most programs would only need you to update the dynamic library on your system
This was, which was stunningly obvious, exactly his point -- most code should be using dynamic libraries (which is code re-use, such as the re-use of the IE libraries that you "outed" as incompetence above). The problem is that lots of code isn't using dynamic libraries, or are reinventing the wheel. This whole issue was the question of "why would IE break 3rd party applications?" when you yourself answered the question "because they use the shared libraries, and thus are fragile if it is fragile".
I guess you missed the bit where zlib (not gzip) code was in all manner of Microsoft products
Most Windows applications use zlib.dll, or variants: One central file with an honoured contract entry-point API, and one single binary build. When zlib had a problem, that one single location is the only place that needed to be replaced. Exactly as the author pointed out -- that is proper code re-use. The downside is that obviously if you break the contract, or expose a new bug (or fix a bug, err, behaviour that people relied upon) then that one file fix can break many applications.
The alternative are applications that basically copy the code from zlib into their own application, faults and all. In that case, when a problem appears in zlib it's not one file that needs to be replaced, but possibly hundreds (each with an individual effort of locating the variant of the bug, replacing, rebuilding, and redistributing). That is an archaic, largely obsolete method of software development.
Microsoft uses just as much Open Source code as any Linux project.
I'm sorry, did I order an extra-large serving of hyperbole? How absurd of a statement.
It isn't at all - I just grabbed the 2.8MB image with absolutely no problems: It saturated my cable (which is 400KB/s)
You know after I wrote that original post I contemplated posting a followup about PageRank - What I had intended to say was that PageRank, which is a published algorithm (possibly patented...too lazy to check), is a very small part of how they rank sites. While there is a general understanding of PageRank, as you rightly noted, Google is very closed lipped about the other machinations that dictate how results are ordered, and those other algorithms have become much more important than PageRank.
If Google released their source code, then yes, evil people could find loopholes and exploit them to artificially boost their rankings... but non-evil people, finding those same loopholes, could work out how to close the loopholes and submit the changes back for inclusion in the running code base. The end result? A better search engine.
Actually your description sounds more like "a constant battle for the status quo" rather than "a better search engine". Of course I think you're tremendously understating the motivation of those who want to exploit loopholes (it is a _huge_ $ business, and one's ranking on Google is of tremendous economic consequence in many businesses), while overstating those who would want to close the loopholes (most people don't have a fat pipe, er the network kind, that allows them to "Scratch their own search itch" and run their own search engine. As such, it's unlikely that there's going to be large ranks of benevolent free programmers scouring through the Google code, apart from a passing curiousity).
You missed his point.
Google's "democratic" page ranking techniques, a part of which is called PageRankTM(C), are unknown entities -- the most we know about how Google ranks pages is based upon trial and error, observations, and some basics like "links from powerful sites improve your ranking". This is intentional as Google wants to avoid sites "stuffing the ballot box", if you will.
If "Search Engine Optimizers" had the source code for Google, it would be a "arms race" of SEOs battling to perfectly match whatever search boosting criteria Google uses - perhaps it wants a certain page churn, or URL length and content, or certain word choices, etc.
If you're running a site that is serving up static "Coming Soon" type pages, rather than a dynamic high-availability type site, there is absolutely no doubt that an Apache/Linux box would be the best choice (really there are even lighter choices -- even a basic install of Apache is quite heavy for such a task)
Note: Before someone goes apeshit, horribly offended that I've implied that Apache is a lesser product, note that that is not what I stated -- my claim is moreso that Apache scales _down_ much further than IIS (down meaning cheaper and more lightweight), though it scales up just as high as IIS.
Perfect, that did it. Thank you kindly.
Don't we have a good-sized "global economy" going on, these days? Turn it around, since the job was outsourced, how many hundreds of programmers in India were able to eat and feed their families? Isn't India one of the more poverty-stricken places in the world?
:)
Your point on globalism made sense up until you portray global trade as some sort of charity. Global trade, in the long term, means that India, much like other evolving nations (although India is a massive exception in that it has a large population that can speak English quite well, as well as a very advanced educational system), will improve their standard of living such that they're buying goods and services from "the West", maintaining or improving the quality of living in the West as well (because the world economy isn't a zero sum game -- many people have foolishly come to believe this because it's been beaten into them that we should feel guilty in the West for consuming all of the world's "wealth", as if it was being done on the backs of the world's poor. This belief betrays a massive lack of understanding of basic economics). Of course at the outset there is a bit of a shock as things balance out and adjust, such that we've seen in IT (though Indian wages have been absolutely skyrocketing).
A Patriot says "Buy the best shit" because the Patriot knows that if your economy is focused on buying the best shit, and they want to survive, they will also produce the best shit.
If only world economics were so simple that it's all about the most cost-effective and best-quality.
How do things like environmental laws come into play? Company A goes out of business in Iowa because of extensive environmental requirements making plastic products more expensive (all of the contamination removal, etc), while they're being undercut by Company B, located in the middle of China, that can just pump it all into the local river. Have you noticed that about 95% of the plastic goods at the local Walmart are made in China? How about the fact that China has pegged their currency to the US dollar basically for the sole purpose of undercutting US trade (the Chinese currency doesn't float like almost all other currencies. I'm too lazy to check, but I believe that India is playing this little trick as well).
Don't wanna be competitive? Then we likely don't need you in the gene pool any more.
If only competition were so simple...
This isn't overly surprizing as Microsoft's MSDN Magazine printed an article about SVG a few months back.
Most of this article was not about working from home, but rather about simply tearing down the cube walls and ensuring that every worker knows that they're just a temporary cog - you still have to drive there to work in the cafeteria.
Having said that, given how much of an information age we are in it is absolutely imperative that policies and initiatives are pursued to encourage and support distributed working (i.e. working at home). I live in the Toronto area, and it is absurd how much of the road infrastructure is there just so people can drive 80km to work, click on a keyboard for 8 hours, and then drive 80km home.
There are arguements for having devs in work, because people fear they might be slacking off, but the proof is in the pudding!
Any organization that has no metrics (such as deliverables, designs, progress on projects, documents, etc. Note that I'm talking about progress-not ridiculous metrics like keystrokes per hour) other than watching from the surveillance tower, is doomed: There is absolutely nothing stopping workers from slacking off right under your eyes.
I'm guessing what you meant to say was that it takes about a minute longer than a CD to burn
I think it means "it's the same as burning a CD in just over a minute" (i.e. a 60x CD burner).
No sane browser will be at all fazed by whitespace. It seems unlikely that it consumes a noticeable amount of processor.
No sane browser will be at all fazed by tables, or by inline CSS, but strangely this whole article is entirely about changing the same.
The point was not that it's an appreciable amount of processor time, or that clients are rotting away waiting for their browser to parse whitespaces, but simply that it's counter-intuitive to add them -- for the person who thinks that it somehow helps the browser, the comment was that no it doesn't (the first step in rendering is to filter out such crud).
The whitespace adds 3% to the size of the HTML...It's also a godawful mess...You've got to remember that gzip is very good at compressing repeated data, e.g. long runs of whitespace.
To hit the final point first-- that it's a "godawful mess"-- how often do you pull up the source to Slashdot? Apart from this article, I never do, as I would guess is the case for the overwhelming majority of readers. That "mess", by the way, is absolutely perfect HTML (just because you can't parse it doesn't make it a mess when the intended receipient is the browser).
The majority of sites do not use gzip on dynamic content (because it's very "resource intensive"...running one gzip command might be quick, but with thousands of incoming connections it can quickly become overwhelming). Ignoring that, let's remember that sites like Slashdot yield millions of hits - in a given month several years ago it was 50 million per month. So presuming that every client accepted gzip (which they don't), that's 15GB to serve up extraneous whitespace. So in the end let's recap what we've achieved:
-Added time to development to ensure that our page generator properly tabs each section
-Added time to runtimes as the string builder iterates through and adds whitespaces
-Added time to gzip as it builds a dictionary of spaces and tabs
-Added time and quantity to transfer as extraneous whitespaces will always yield a larger file with any non-broken compression algorithm
-Added time on the client end to render the page
Why? So that when someone who misunderstands xhtml does a page source view they don't perceive it as a "mess". Regardless of how minimal each of the above is, it seems like nothing but waste.
Note: I'm not religious about this, and personally I couldn't care less what Slashdot's bandwidth bill is, but it just fascinates me how people will go to such lengths for something that is overwhelmingly negative, all under the flawed perception that it achieves some sort of purity of HTML.
Could it be that PEOPLE WANT TO SHARE THEIR BANDWITH?!!!
Highly, highly, highly doubtful. While I certainly can't claim to have done exhaustive studies (or even "asked some dude what he thinks" studies...), I would guess that the vast majority of them simply are clueless about how open their network is, or if they are aware it's more likely open because it's an inconvenience to bother toggling a bit or setting up MAC addresses. Most people have a belief that whatever happens out there, it happens to other people, so someone remorah'ing their connection isn't a possibility.
I did not hear any advice about enabling MAC address filtering, which would prevent any unauthorized access.
MAC filtering without encryption is pretty much useless - monitor MAC addresses and alias one of those.
"4. Top ten lists usually forget about the distant past - and only mention items that the reasership is familliar with. Like the list of important historical events that fails to mention items before 1950."
I love when radio stations do the "top 100 pop song of all time" type countdowns, and amazingly about 92 of the songs are from the prior two years.
Your sarcasm is quite out of place. Let me explain the use of quotation marks in the context of the grand-parent comment.
"no one" - This is quoted because directly following it, and as the exception, I'm humanizing the browser.
"readable" - Directly relating to the prior point, I've humanized the browser and am stating that it's reading the HTML, yet obviously it really isn't.
"mechanically generated" - While indeed this is literally correct, most people correlate mechanical with gears and cogs and big machines.
"source-code" - Most developers have an issue calling HTML code.
Thanks for your participation.
I apologize. I've been reading some of my recent "quickly typed while going past the PC" messages and I'd swear I was illiterate. Alas.
Excellent point on mod_gzip. One thing to note is that you get a double-whammy with excess whitespaces when using mod_gzip - not only will the final result still be larger (albeit to a greatly decreased degree), mod_gzip (which is a tool that is heavily resource intensive, which is why most sites don't use it) had to spend time processing whitespaces-instead of wasting bandwidth, your wasting processor time.
But this article itself is intended to be read by developers, and clarity counts.
Definitely agree, but the use of such whitespaces is so prevalent that it is likely the suggested "source" format.
Whitespace isn't going to be your biggest bandwidth waster
True enough, but you don't always have to take on the biggest foe first - whitespace is one of those things that was actually intentionally added (it was more work to cleanly whitespace), so it would actually be less work to have skipped it.
Why don't you measure it and compare it to other optimizations before you recommend that people spend their time changing it?
Slashdot serves up millions of pages a day. One useless tab is several MB of Slashdot's bandwidth for absolutely no, or little, gain. I don't need to measure it (and, quite simply, I don't care enough too, though if someone wants to they can grab the tidy utility from the W3C, which strips out whitespace) to see that there is considerable waste in there. In the grand scheme of things it really isn't that much of a hit, but given that it was work to add it...
And "an"?
This is the classic response to that comment (about wasteful whitespace), yet I don't buy it.
a) Totally guessing, but about 99.9999% of the pages served up are interpreted by "no one" other than the browser. It's more "readable" by the browser minus the whitespace.
b) Most pages, like this, is "mechanically generated" - What you see in the final results was rendered: It isn't the "source-code". As such there is absolutely no code maintenance issues.
What you're left with is the prospect that maybe one out of every million page hits is going to a Slashdot developer who's debugging that the rendered properly, though if it's XHTML transitional then a XML editor would be a great choice and would again make it irrelevant if it's clogged full of waste whitespace.
I've always been partial to F5 myself.
In any case, I've looked at the final example (the "optimized" page), and while it's nice to see someone pushing for the adoption of `cutting edge' (as of 1999) CSS, how about eliminating all of the completely wasteful, bandwidth and processor consuming, whitespace? Unless this is python at whitespace affects scope (which it isn't), I don't see why so many sites have such a fetish with tabbed and spaced HTML when the browser discards it as garbage bytes, actually wasting time (albeit a tiny amount, but nonetheless) parsing through it.
People can't unilaterally toss laws out the window when it's self-serving to do so (although this is the reality that many Slashdotters try to portray). If this were the case then you'd better get your shotgun because hello anarchy...what's this "grocery store" charing _money_ of all things for _food_, man? I need food, so I'm just going to take it. Etc.
While obviously there is a bit of hyperbole in your statement (I highly doubt there are many systems defined as "supercomputers" that consume less than 3 digits or so of kW...certainly not 400-500W that a worst case enthusiast consumes), I really wonder if home computing has really gotten that much worse. Around 11 years ago I remember getting a 350W power supply for my 386-33 (with Diamond Speedstar 24x!), and this was pretty much par for the course - of course the CPU itself consumed much less power (I think around 5W) than some of the high end CPUs (that can consume up to 80W), however the board and surrounding hardware generally consumed a lot more power then.