Ask HN: Why is Amazon's HTML crazy?

9 points·samdunne··9 comments

If you view the source on any product page you have around 100 lines of whitespace and the <title> isn't found until line 3,500-ish

Not to mention all of their CSS is inline

Why is it like this? It seems to me it is far more complex than it needs to be

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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

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

That is definitely a forgotten debug point

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

html is for the browser to read not people.

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