RE: <tr> and <td> closing tags

(original message reinserted)
 i've seen google don't close <tr> and <td> tags with </tr> and </td>.
 probably  to  safe  some  precious  bytes. and browser don't seems to
 care. is it still html compliant?

>> It is compliant with HTML, but not with XHTML. In other words you will be
>> backwards compatible still, but not forwards compatible. It saves
>> bytes over
>> the network, at the cost of kilobytes in browser size, meaning
>> more expensive
>> systems are required to read it.
>
>Not only do the browsers have to be more complicated and expensive in terms
>of footprint, download time, and development cost, but they will still take
>longer to render such constructs.
>Back in the day when </p> was optional (and worse - many browsers treated
></p> as significant) I speeded up some heavy pages (around
>80k-150k for just
>the HTML - don't ask!) by putting the optional </p> tags in. Even over a
>28.8 on a bad phone line (generally functioning at around 20kbps) the time
>from start of download to rendering of page was appreciably improved (can't
>give an exact time as it was obviously faster and I didn't need to know
>beyond that).

This makes sense (though slightly counter-intuitive) - if the tags aren't
closed then the browser will have to keep piling the data onto a stack until
it can be (reasonably) sure of each block's intended endpoint, which in an
extreme case might mean getting right to the end of the doc and having to
backtrack all the way through to build the structure. Big memory/processor
cost. Come on Google, close them tags!

Cheers,
Danny.

Received on Wednesday, 13 March 2002 07:56:34 UTC