

Ask HN: Why is Amazon's HTML crazy? - samdunne

If you view the source on any product page you have around 100 lines of whitespace and the &#60;title&#62; isn't found until line 3,500-ish<p>Not to mention all of their CSS is inline<p>Why is it like this? It seems to me it is far more complex than it needs to be
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gee_totes
How is this crazy?

* Newlines seperating HTML tags (check)

* Semi-semantic class and id names (check)

* Can read it with raw view-source (check)

You wanna see something really crazy? View-source on this one:

<https://plus.google.com/101139676677179148632/about?hl=en>

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rzimmerman
For some reason they have the following comment towards the bottom of the
homepage:

<!-- MEOW -->

~~~
samdunne
That is definitely a forgotten debug point

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fadzlan
I would suppose when you see a page from Amazon, there are numbers of the
system that contributes to the page. Some with HTML, some with API. And as
other commenter mentions, these are all generated by some backend system.
Probably no one has to full control on how to format HTML at the front. Or
they probably can, but with a lot of meetings.

The store front probably just gather all this stuff to produce the final page
that you see.

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houjieth
Because they are all legacy code. No one wants to do the cleaning work.

~~~
brudgers
More importantly, no one needs to do it.

And most importantly, no one is allowed to do it because it does not need to
be done.

White space is free as in beer (when all the bandwidth available for AWS is a
sunk cost).

~~~
elclanrs
Exactly. Don't expect your HTML to be perfectly indented unless you're writing
that HTML yourself, but most people don't, an Amazon surely doesn't. The HTML
is generated server side.

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wcfields
Just took a quick look. I'm guessing they separated it into 20+ linebreaks
between chunks to delineate which section of code produced which HTML.

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ibudiallo
html is for the browser to read not people.

