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Google's 404 Page

15 points| exupero | 14 years ago |exupero.tumblr.com | reply

8 comments

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[+] mmahemoff|14 years ago|reply
Paul Irish recently shined a light on the Google 404 page in his talk on the primitives of HTML5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxmcDoAxdoY (around 19:20).

In the talk, he explains that all this is valid HTML5. You don't need quotes, you don't generally need closing tags. Whether you choose to them depends on how dirty it makes you feel, but few browsers will actually care.

A separate but related lesson is that Google cares a ton about performance, so you'll often find these byte-saving tricks in high-traffic Google pages. e.g. the use of "//foo.com" instead of "http://foo.com.

[+] csulok|14 years ago|reply
that's not bytesaving, that's called protocol relative URLs, meaning if the linking page is https, //foo.com will be loaded as https://foo.com. most google properties have https modes, this is a way to reduce the complexity of the page and whatever generates the html code.
[+] gghootch|14 years ago|reply
Google uses some clever trick to hide the closing tags in your browser. Download the file and open it in your editor of choice, the closing tags are there.

http://i.imgur.com/vCyrY.png

EDIT: Or chrome is auto-adding the tags? As mentioned below curl doesn't replicate the same results, nor does Firefox.

[+] exupero|14 years ago|reply
The WebKit inspector adds closing tags. You have to view source or use curl.
[+] sramov|14 years ago|reply

    curl www.google.com/lalalala