[PaulHoule]

I think a lot of those are bogus, but there are some real ones such as cases where there is no space between attributes, like

    <element this=“that”in=“out”/>

there are a lot of old elements being used where css could be used instead, probably if the HTML was updated like that and they were smart about selectors it would get the page size down a bit. Then there is the <doctype> thing which may seem like a lot of bullshit, I don’t know how it now but years ago it did make a difference because if you didn’t have it browsers would go into a compatibility mode with old web pages.

Part of Netscape’s competitive advantage back in the day was that it handled broken HTML in an undocumented way and broken HTML is so common that a browser that doesn’t handle broken HTML the same way is a broken browser. One of the many great things in HTML is that it defines that behavior.

It would be a fun project to CSS-ize the HN front page with an aim to minimizing size.

[zagrebian]

> Then there is the <doctype> thing which may seem like a lot of bullshit, I don’t know how it now but years ago it did make a difference because if you didn’t have it browsers would go into a compatibility mode with old web pages.

This is still true. Browsers run HN in quirks mode. Just open the devtools console in Firefox, and it will tell you.