Re: The argument for |bugmode|

Kornel Lesinski wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Apr 2007 21:20:33 +0100, Matthew Raymond  
> <mattraymond@earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
>>> For alternate equivalent syntaxes, a one byte difference may
>>> possibly be a valid consideration, but in the general case
>>> bandwidth is not a valid argument one way or the other.
>> It is for a company that gets massive numbers of hits like Google or  
>> Yahoo.
> 
> I don't think that bandwidth is that precious to Google. Their homepage  
> could be made both smaller and standards-compliant:
> http://www.456bereastreet.com/lab/google/
> but apparently Google doesn't care about either of those things.

   While the pages appear nearly identical on the surface, the Google
page has an additional popup menu when you click "more >>", plus
scripting related to that menu. That alone accounts for most of the
difference in size, so the standards-based example isn't all that much
smaller, at least for Mozilla Firefox 2.0. Furthermore, the markup of
the two pages is so different that it's difficult to tell if they both
actually do the same thing.

   Also, note that there are a lot of features of Google's markup that
appear optimized to reduce bandwidth, even if more optimization could be
done. The doctype is omitted, whitespace is kept to a minimum, and
quotations are use for attributes only when necessary. With word wrap
turned off, it's only 23 lines. By contrast, your example has 34 lines.
So at best you could say that the could do MORE optimization and not
that they weren't trying to optimize in the first place.

   This is still a much better argument than Terje was offering, though.

>> The second problem is that the guy in charge of browser development
>> at Microsoft has rejected a perfectly reasonable solution without giving
>> sufficient justification.
> 
> I think Chris, as a Microsoft representative, has given perfect  
> justification for this: he's not willing to cause any trouble to  
> Microsoft's customers, because that's bad business for Microsoft.

   I didn't say he didn't have a reason, I just said it wasn't sufficient.

> The problem is that his solution makes one vendor's life easier at the  
> cost of all other vendors, and that's not something you'd expect from W3C  
> WG chair.

   It's exactly what people were concerned would happen if he became
chair, though. It may be that Chris made his comments with his "chair
hat off", but if so, he needs to make that clear in his emails because
he's been doing a poor job if it so far.

Received on Sunday, 22 April 2007 03:40:45 UTC