Confusing title; I assumed it meant they were recommending avoiding the <main> tag, which seems weird but OK, it’s a new one and we’ve seen document outline tags get deprecated before. But no — they’re recommending avoiding the <head> and <body> tags! These are literally the first things you are taught when you learn HTML. This seems like a pretty fundamental change to have slipped in here without further explanation. What’s the reasoning?
I know it all adds up, but stripping <html><head></head><body></body></html> seems like a miniscule saving compared to the huge amounts of cruft stuffed into most websites.
That's true. Presumably this is for extreme cases when you really need that extra bit of performance.
Perhaps HTML could have been better designed with performance in mind. Every tag you open (i.e. <foo>) you're supposed to close (i.e. </foo>) which is quite redundant in terms of bytes when you think about it. It is easy to imagine markup languages that minimize the number of bytes the client has to transfer.
I think Google has a set of very specific aims, that aren't so relevant to a lot of other organisations.
Cutting out optional tags will improve page size, download speed etc; something that's obviously important when you're serving so many billions of users.
