Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why is Amazon's HTML crazy?

news.ycombinator.com

1–10 of 10 posts

Ask HN: Why is Amazon's HTML crazy?

#1
If you view the source on any product page you have around 100 lines of whitespace and the 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

Re: Ask HN: Why is Amazon's HTML crazy?

#6
post #2

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).

Re: Ask HN: Why is Amazon's HTML crazy?

#7
post #6
post #2

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.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Amazon's HTML crazy?

#10
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.