I still don't get it, amazon.com homepage HTML quality

Why all the wasted whitespace, unquoted values

[mrVW]

I use IE 5.5 on Windows 2000, I view source of the Amazon.com home page...

I see groups of DOZENS of blank lines, lines that are space followed by CRLF, I see A HREF= without the value quoted,

Is there a book on HTML style for big sites, that breaks all the rules I've read on "good HTML"?

Oh yha, I notice they quote their values on their img src tages, but not the a href's...

The blank lines and wasted space must account for 5% or more of the bytes on this page. One would think the bandwidth savings and decreased 28.8 download time would justify the... 2 hours? it would take to fix this (by 1 person).

Any ideas on WHY they won't fix this? And why DOZENS of large sites I have seen have similar or worse problems?

Don't even get me started about the quality of HTML that the Fusetalk forum produces? I can't believe sites using that product can afford to pay their bandwidth bill.

[oilman]

I think with sites like Amazon they don't really care about stuff like bandwidth and all. In my experience I've found that lots of big sites have totally underqualified webmasters. There is more focus on the backend of things ie databases etc and as long as the site displays properly they're happy.

So much of these sites is dynamically generated that it would probably take more time than they feel appropriate to fix up all the code.

my 2 cents

[Xoc]

Realize that almost any graphic takes up more bytes than an entire page of HTML. It just doesn't pay to optimize the number of bytes in HTML. As I tell people in my HTML classes, don't put your master's theses in HTML comments, but for the most part they don't hurt if you have even a single graphic on the page.

[Brett_Tabke]

But, don't you just wonder about some of these sites cranking out 90+k pages? Some of which only come out as 640wide by about 1000 pixels tall anyway. It just seem soooo silly not to put the whole homepage in a tightly optimized jpeg bitmap and forget about. Here they are, stressing out about css, js, xml and the whole host of compatibility issues, and a simple jpeg would be quicker, more control, and come close (if not beat), the same size of html download.

As a guy who has been on a browser beta test team where "what is wrong with this site" is the mantra, I've seen ever kind of html error you could possibly make. IE and front page have done more damage to the web than all the viruii combined. Did you know that a single quote ' will also work in place of a " double quote? Did you know that there are now browsers that have problems with correct syntax such as:

/discussion.cgi?forum=10&discussion=384

The web is such a mess. (sorry for the rant).

>dyno generated.

Absolutly right Oil. I am going through pains trying to get some dyno generated code to fly. The page(s) are built from 12 scripts, with 40+ tables, 1 css file, 1js file, and I can't find a validator that will tell me what is wrong with the code, yet Netscape displays a blank page. (passes the w3c validator)