[plug] Hacker challenge ends in feuding

[Derek Fountain]

> The simplest way to increase the speed at which your web-app appears at
> the users' browser is to buffer the output and gzip it - given that the
> browser supports this. This is cheating IMHO, but it works.

Heh, yeah, cheating! I've never tried it myself. Does it actually work over a 
fast link? i.e. is the delay at the server while the data is compressed more 
or less than the time it would take to send the extra uncompressed data? On a 
fast, lightly loaded server, with a dialup connection, it obviously makes 
sense. I just wonder how soon the break even point is reached.

> Reducing the number of bytes in your HTML, eg, using style-sheets as
> linked files, not embedded, re-using graphics, reducing the number of
> line-feeds/tabs/spaces, all help to make your page come down faster.

Ryan said the same thing, but again I have to wonder: How much can you strip 
out of the average HTML page? 1K? Maybe 2K or 3K on a very cluttered page? A 
1K saving will only see a 1/50th second saved over my broadband connection, 
and over an internal network the difference will be minute. I suppose over a 
5Kb/sec dialup link those larger fractions of seconds add up.

> My designers generally use WYSIWYmG HTML editors, and their code is very
> bloated with little or no advantage. I generally go through their
> supplied templates and clean them up.

Now, can you honestly say you do that because it makes the code more 
efficient, or do you do it because your professional pride screams at you 
saying you can't let that inefficient junk out of the door with your name 
anywhere near it? :o)

> ---Start #1---
> ---Start #2---
> ---Start #3---
<snip!>

I can claim to have started PHP development at point 3, but I'm not sure 
you'll like the reason why. :o) I do most of my HTML development in 
Dreamweaver on a Windows box, then add PHP around it using Linux, XEmacs etc.

Tools have been created so HTML design and generation can be automated. It 
might not be the same quality of HTML that can be hand coded, but it makes 
the job quick and easy. Not everyone uses them yet, but then some people 
still write ASM code because they don't trust a compiler to do an acceptable 
job. ;o)

I'm not knocking the efforts put in by people who hand code their HTML - each 
to his own - but I have trouble believing that your code "runs rings around 
the opposition" because of this. I was expecting you to give me clues and 
tips on server side PHP in answer to my question!

-- 
"...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE 
...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, 
they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003