So… after skimming my feed reader, I come across an interesting article about Google’s XHTML coding practices, and the advice they give their “followers.” (I know, I know — that doesn’t FEEL like the right word to use there, but then again I might just be on twitter too much.)
Taken from the blog post:
The Google homepage and search results pages don’t end their
and elements. They just leave them open– a lot like a lazy developer might do and then feel guilty when he comes back and sees the mistake.Only this “mistake” is really part of Google’s strategy of treating their performance as a competitive advantage. All browsers work well without the tags and the tags take up time, so they’re excited to eliminate any millisecond they can for their visitors.
Now, oftentimes, I compare websites and web design to cars and mechanics. You take your car to a mechanic and you expect them to use the proper tools, knowledge, and procedure to deliver what you asked for — which, in most cases, is a working car — without screwing you on the price. Swap out car for website, swap out mechanic for developer, and it’s the same thing. As developers, we’re expecting to use our knowledge to present our clients with products that properly address their needs.
Part of that knowledge, unfortunately for most of us, is knowing good advice from the bad.
I must admit… I’m a little stupefied by Google’s “optimisation” technique. Take a look at their tips on their page titled, “Let’s Make The Web Faster!” What you get is a skirt steak of information, when you might be hungry for a New York Strip. At least.. that’s what it felt like to me. I’m generally skeptical of ANY advice given by a giant company.. and it’s hard to say what stake G has — other than faster crawling time, maybe? — in you speeding up your website, so let’s just say that this is advice offered for altruistic reasons. Altogether, really, it’s bad advice. If you didn’t take a look at the link earlier, let me share another gooey part:
If you already knew and used this trick, well, then you’re in the minority because none of the other top 10 sites (Alexa) take advantage of this to reduce bandwidth and improve the download speed. Admittedly, for complex pages it’s a very small percentage of bytes per view (14 bytes or so per request), but why would you send your visitors more information than they need?
Therein lies the rub. Why don’t they? Perhaps they use gzip compression? Perhaps they believe that the standards set for by the development community are more important than a fraction of a second’s worth of time saved on a page load? Perrrrrrrhaps they use one of 50 other techniques available in .htaccess or PHP or various and sundry other methods to save their visitor time without compromising any standards?
Google takes advantage of this because of one simple reason: money. If I were them, I’d do it too. If my home page is served a million times an hour, saving 30 bytes per request, what do you think they’re saving in server costs? Is this really going to translate to the same kind of savings for the average webmaster? Highly doubtful.
As developers, we learn by taking in information and assessing how useful it is. At first glance, this might seem like great advice! Dig a little deeper, and you uncover much more fruitful methods for speeding up your website that can save you MUCH more than 30bytes (although, it must be noted that Google uses these as well.. it’s just literally not worth the non-semantic status to do both for the average client.)
In short, three cheers to G for getting webmasters and developers alike to think a little more. I simply wish that if they were going to offer advice, it would help advance the web… not bring us sliding backwards. Hell, the way I feel now, has me thinking we’re being catapulted back to this. LOL.
PS: I don’t care about their decision to use HTML over XHTML. To me, it’s inconsequential. If you’re more interested in/intrigued by the debate, check out this juicy goodness over at SitePoint.
Categories: Google • Web Design • Web Development
