Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 216 posts

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#161

Post by dennisgorelik »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #139
adbge wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of webpages with HTML that's just plain wrong (and renders fine!) is staggering. I often wonder what the web would be like if web browsers threw an error upon encountering a syntax error rather than making a best effort to render. If you're writing HTML, you should be validating it: http://validator.w3.org/

Google.com has 39 errors and 2 warnings. Among other things, they don't close their body or html tags. Is there any real downside to having syntax errors?

It looks like Google Front page developers simply don't care about HTML compliance.

There is no reason to allow most of these errors other than coding sloppiness.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co...

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#162

Post by mmaunder »

PG: welcome to the woes of being an alexa top 1000 site with over 1 million pages of dynamic content.

HN has roughly 1.3 million pages indexed by google.

1.3M pages at 43k per page is 53 gigs to cache static versions of all pages on the site. Quadruple that for a worst case scenario and it'll still easily fit on a single drive.

When your site gets this popular you tend to have to re-architect your application to solve perf issues. You could serve googlebot UA's 1 week old cached pages for example.

I'd encourage you to start thinking of yourself as a utility providing a valuable and necessary resource to the Net and take the time and energy to solve this properly.

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#163

Post by bascule »

wheels wrote: post #138
pg wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Rtm has already set one up.

The conspicuous lack of a "Server:" header inclines me to believe that that's probably not the case (most web servers set one indicating the server software and version). Here are the headers that HN sends out from an old post (20 days ago): HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Cache-Control: private Connection: close Cache-Control: max-age=0

My favorite part of HN's headers: the lines are separated by naked LFs instead of CRLF, in violation of the HTTP spec

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#164

Post by gcr »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #139
adbge wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of webpages with HTML that's just plain wrong (and renders fine!) is staggering. I often wonder what the web would be like if web browsers threw an error upon encountering a syntax error rather than making a best effort to render. If you're writing HTML, you should be validating it: http://validator.w3.org/

Google.com has 39 errors and 2 warnings. Among other things, they don't close their body or html tags. Is there any real downside to having syntax errors?

For the Google homepage, every byte counts. I'm not surprised.

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#165

Post by divtxt »

bascule wrote: post #163
wheels wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conspicuous lack of a "Server:" header inclines me to believe that that's probably not the case (most web servers set one indicating the server software and version). Here are the headers that HN sends out from an old post (20 days ago): HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Cache-Control: private Connection: close Cache-Control: max-age=0

My favorite part of HN's headers: the lines are separated by naked LFs instead of CRLF, in violation of the HTTP spec

This is common violation that everyone accepts. It's definitely done by 'bad' clients - not sure how often servers send bare LF.

(I used to telnet to port 80 for testing, and type GET / HTTP/1.0 , and that should be LF on Linux & Mac)

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#167

Post by thristian »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #139
adbge wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of webpages with HTML that's just plain wrong (and renders fine!) is staggering. I often wonder what the web would be like if web browsers threw an error upon encountering a syntax error rather than making a best effort to render. If you're writing HTML, you should be validating it: http://validator.w3.org/

Google.com has 39 errors and 2 warnings. Among other things, they don't close their body or html tags. Is there any real downside to having syntax errors?

The downside is maintainability. If your website follows the rules, you can be pretty confident that any weird behaviour you see is a problem with the browser (which is additional context you can use when googling for a solution). If your website requires browsers to quietly patch it into a working state, you have no guarantees that they'll all do it the same way and you'll probably spend a bunch of time working around the differing behaviour.

Obviously, that's not a problem if you already know exactly how different browsers will treat your code, or you're using parsing errors so elemental that they must be patched up identically for the page to work. For example, on the Google homepage, they don't escape ampersands that appear in URLs (like href="http://example.com/?foo=bar&baz=qux — the & should be &). That's a syntax error, but one that maybe 80% of the web commits, so any browser that couldn't handle it wouldn't be very useful.

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#169

Post by [deleted] »

larrys wrote: post #121
billpatrianakos wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems he doesn't want to. From what I understand there's the possibility that he'd prefer to accomplish his goal without the use of Wemaster Tools. Like I said, he knows his shit, so he's going to do things on his terms if he can. Webmaster Tools might be what the average guy wants to use but then there are some who follow the beat of their own drummer whenever possible for whatever reasons we may never know.

Speaking of knowing ones shit your site listed in your profile billpatrianakos.com is dead - no dns being returned.

[deleted]

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#170

Post by marshray »

divtxt wrote: post #165
bascule wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite part of HN's headers: the lines are separated by naked LFs instead of CRLF, in violation of the HTTP spec

This is common violation that everyone accepts. It's definitely done by 'bad' clients - not sure how often servers send bare LF. (I used to telnet to port 80 for testing, and type GET / HTTP/1.0 , and that should be LF on Linux & Mac)

You don't know that everyone accepts it. Even if they did, it doesn't make it right.
Post reply on HN