

Google's 404 Page - exupero
http://exupero.tumblr.com/post/13403057874/googles-404-page

======
mmahemoff
Paul Irish recently shined a light on the Google 404 page in his talk on the
primitives of HTML5: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxmcDoAxdoY> (around
19:20).

In the talk, he explains that all this is valid HTML5. You don't need quotes,
you don't generally need closing tags. Whether you choose to them depends on
how dirty it makes you feel, but few browsers will actually care.

A separate but related lesson is that Google cares a ton about performance, so
you'll often find these byte-saving tricks in high-traffic Google pages. e.g.
the use of "//foo.com" instead of "<http://foo.com>.

~~~
csulok
that's not bytesaving, that's called protocol relative URLs, meaning if the
linking page is https, //foo.com will be loaded as <https://foo.com>. most
google properties have https modes, this is a way to reduce the complexity of
the page and whatever generates the html code.

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AndrewDucker
If you look at <http://code.google.com/speed/articles/optimizing-html.html>
you'll see what HTML allows you to get away with...

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gghootch
Google uses some clever trick to hide the closing tags in your browser.
Download the file and open it in your editor of choice, the closing tags are
there.

<http://i.imgur.com/vCyrY.png>

EDIT: Or chrome is auto-adding the tags? As mentioned below curl doesn't
replicate the same results, nor does Firefox.

~~~
exupero
The WebKit inspector adds closing tags. You have to view source or use curl.

~~~
csulok
well no, the browser adds them when it loads and parses it for rendering. the
inspector just shows you what the browser created. the same is true for all
browsers, their inspectors will reveal how the DOM looks like for the browser.

~~~
joshma
If we're discussing semantics here, when a browser parses it for rendering
what would it mean to "add them?" After all, the HTML is only a textual
representation of the rendered DOM tree. I think it's perfectly valid to say
the inspector is adding them in, since the browser doesn't really bother to
adjust the HTML if it can already parse it.

