Re: HTML hype or bs?

Gregory Alan Bolcer (gbolcer@gambetta.ICS.uci.edu)
Mon, 15 Jun 1998 08:06:09 -0700


> http://www.antimonysoftware.com/mizer.html
> what are the opinions on this?

Anyone who charges $69.99 for a whitespace stripper
is a serious mizer. Readibility is
one of the critical success factors of the WWW. Some would
even argue that Java, JavaScript, VBScript, and all incantations of
generated HTML and frames, etc. has put content development
back out of the reach of the common man. Why put the
optimizations in the Web content? There's no reason why
servers can't do on-the-fly compression without preserving
readibility. With this tool, to either edit it by hand or
through a tool, you have to refer back to a copy.

There is a good paper on the performance effects of
persistent HTTP connections, pipelining, and link
level document compression (the last of which may
be of interest to this snake oil salesman) at:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Performance/Pipeline

They have some excellent compression information about
data taken from a couple of real world Web sites (Microscrape).

Greg