I mean check out the code, Look at all that bloody white space, lol and a number of aspects are not specific
Its compressed in transit, its irrelevant.
It does as recent white paper articles and w3schools have been talking about last couple of months and relevent to the browser rendering
Dont be silly.
I am not
- Create a site and code and then an external css - Put lots of returns and needless spacing, Then copy that and remove all the white space - File size difference.
- I can pull up a lot of java, php and asp documentation about code reduction INCLUDING white space and show load times to be different as the text stream is processed
- bbc site has no white space property and so the browser will consider it normal and so will run through the browser stream and render the white space thus taking longer to render but there is no use using the property if you create neat code with not a lot of white space and actually recommended not to use it anyway
- You render css and html and javascript in your browser as these are client side rendering and it does not matter if anything fancy generating goes on server side as the output stream is what is being sent to you and then rendered by the browser and so if that is full of crap you will render a lot of needles crap.
One of the constant improvements in css and javascript for example is removing the need for returns and space hence why you can do a lot of border style on one line with less "border-width" new line "border-style" etc
Javascript/ajax is much the same.
Take a framework you choose to use for example, say mootools. Download that framework and you will notice the .js file is one wall of text becuase it has been cleaned to remove white space. With sites using more style and ajax your client does a lot more rendering and so it is indeed important to have clean code that is not just readable but as said less white space and returns the better. Recent recommendations have even gone as far as discussions in regard to comments. They are still needed but new guidelines about how to document them as well as even xml summary including sheets in regard to seamantics.
Even if you ran say apache file compresion you would say get 4% reduction, clear your white space and code better and you would get that 4% reduction anyway yourself if you took proper practises.
In small sites this is of course not a problem but in large sites such as the bbc it is important and in terms of css and javascript. If it was still just text, some images and a bit of css then there is no real need but as the web continues and the sites increase and more is added in terms of the client side scripting and style and rending it is becoming increasingly important to reduce the text stream as much as possible and bigger the site and code the bigger the gain when you reduce the needles text that is there.
Any of the cool apps you find made from people like facebook, apple, google etc all do this and more in terms of code optimisation, and it has always been a good practise anyway to do in any programming.
I could also discuss about small form factor devices like mobile phones and using the real internet and not phone nets and the browsers and the rendering on them etc as well but the above points apply.
Besides you can have some whitespace if you have a lot of coders working or adding to a basic xhtml template or code environment but the bbc site source takes the piss on every file.
