Formatted HTML Source

Do engines even care?

[panic]

Example A

<table>
<tr><td>One</td></tr>
<tr><td>Two</td></tr>
<tr><td>Three</td></tr>
</table>

Example B

<table><tr><td>One</td></tr><tr><td>Two</td></tr><tr><td>Three</td></tr></table>

Would example A rank just as well as example B in the search engines, or would example A rank above example B for its structure?

-panic

[TGecho]

I wouldn't think search engines would see a difference. However a human would :)

[Scaramanga]

A human would only see the difference if they viewed the source code. Only web developers would do that, and they're a very small subset of humans :-)

The output viewed from a browser would look identical, and that's what most humans would see.

Personally I'm not too worried about designing websites for humans - animal websites will be the next big thing! I'm currently working on a web portal for monkeys.

[MonkeeSage]

Just point the way, I'm there... :D :D :D

Jordan

[krieves]

Quark Monkeys? Count me in!

[NickH]

If anything, you may see a very slight benefit, assuming you scrunch the whole page. Spiders and humans will see faster response times; spiders will see a smaller file size, and a higher concentration of text.

Nick

[TheDave]

yep for every line break there's an extra 1 or 2 bytes. Over a thousand lines that's 1000 bytes that don't need to be there.

[msr986]

>The output viewed from a browser would look identical

That's not actually true. Image spacing will be rendered differently. For instance:

<img src="my.jpg" height="30" width="30">
<img src="my.jpg" height="30" width="30">

Will render with a space between the images.

<img src="my.jpg" height="30" width="30"><img src="my.jpg" height="30" width="30">

Will render without a space. Not a big difference, but this may be an issue for some pages.

[MatthewHSE]

> Will render without a space. Not a big difference, but this may be an issue for some pages.

I found that one out the hard way, after an afternoon of frustration because things just wouldn't work right . . . :)

[krieves]

I stumbled into that instance also. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on, only to find that a carriage return in the code was the culprit. But it's something I'll now never forget. ;)