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Comment by pona-a | Hacker News Reader

I actually noticed that! I was debugging some HTTP proxy and typed out an HTTP/1.1 request by hand in netcat, and was wondering why I saw a giant blob of dynamic nonsense instead of a small bit of markup.

(This was when it had the language scroll though, I think moving the extras to JS should have resolved that issue; maybe I was misremembering the details too.)

example.com is not a user-facing service. I don't want to disparage the designer, but it's not meant to be pretty. It's meant to be small so you can copy its response to an automated test or visually verify its correctness, or just out of the bandwidth consideration you'd still be serving it to billions of requestors, even if you insist it's not meant to be used that way.

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I believe your use is what they're trying to discourage.

example.com is meant to be legally allowed to be used in text such as "You visit a website (example.com) to browse the internet"

It is not meant to be queried by automated tests or used as a service.

I never queried it _automatically_, but many projects do. They might not have set out to provide that use, but what happened has happened, and breaking this implicit contract for a silly redesign is an odd choice.

> It's meant to be small [...], even if [...] it's not meant to be used that way

It is not, in fact, _meant_ to be used that way.

> and was wondering why I saw a giant blob of dynamic nonsense instead of a small bit of markup.

It's 4.5x the size of the original. Which sounds bad, until you notice this means it's 2540 bytes and serves the explanatory text in 6x the number of languages. And it's now served with brotli compression, for a total of 1713 bytes. Or 334 bytes if you only request the HTML (which still has a usable page with the full English version of the explanatory text), like a basic scraper or a health check would. So for the vast majority of traffic, it's now half the size of the old version.

I notice it's been through several revisions, the pre-2025 version of the site most people are familiar with is 1270 bytes because it didn't make use of any minification, and it also triggered an unnecessary `/favicon.ico` request because it didn't use the trick to cancel the request.

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