A million! Imagine how much bandwidth HN could save if each comment didn't use n...

seiji · on Feb 9, 2011

Or gzip for that matter. :)

gzipping this thread page results in a 5x size decrease.

Can't blame pg though. He's just a product of his computational adolescence. In another 15 years, we'll still be using CSS and divs while the kids move on to 3D direct brain interface temporal markup languages.

ElbertF · on Feb 9, 2011

Or tables with spacer images. What is this, 1995?

flyosity · on Feb 10, 2011

Wow, I never peeked at the HN HTML source before but it's pretty terrible. Tables nested within tables, tables used for layout and non-tabular data, CSS only used for colors and fonts. It's such a simple layout that I can't believe they didn't go all-CSS for it and make the HTML really semantic and tight.

pg · on Feb 9, 2011

How much bandwidth would that save?

gduffy · on Feb 9, 2011

I'd guess anywhere from 100GB to 1TB every month depending on whether you did the inline style suggestion and/or the gzip suggestion.

This page gzip'd: http://www.google.com/search?q=30+*+1e6+*+(52KB-10KB)

Front page gzip'd: http://www.google.com/search?q=30+*+1e6+*+(25KB-5KB)

So probably not worth it :)

zepolen · on Feb 10, 2011

Gzip is always worth it, it lowers the per client transmission time and because browsers render gzipped pages after they have been loaded the page appears instantly in one go.

It actually creates the impression of a faster site even if the real time to load is the same.

Considering the only thing necessary to enable gzip is to enable it in the front facing web server and that it uses barely any cpu at all on level 4 I don't see why anyone wouldn't use it.

pg · on Feb 10, 2011

the only thing necessary to enable gzip is to enable it in the front facing web server

Somewhat more is necessary in this case.

wladimir · on Feb 10, 2011

Given that gzipping is generally a matter of adding a line to the web server configuration file, and it gives so much savings, I'd say it's worth it.

As for the HTML suggestion, I'd skip that one, it's just a few bytes per comment and needs actual code changes.

pbhjpbhj · on Feb 10, 2011

ZOMG!

I'm actually really surprised by this .. does anyone know the rationale/reason for such poor markup and lack of optimisation?

RyanMcGreal · on Feb 10, 2011

> Arc embodies a similarly unPC attitude to HTML. The predefined libraries just do everything with tables. Why? Because Arc is tuned for exploratory programming, and the W3C-approved way of doing things represents the opposite spirit.

http://www.paulgraham.com/arc0.html