6 ms·
View the source. All the css is inlined, the images are base64 encoded, and there's no closing tag. That's one efficient 404!
by nathan82 16y ago
View the source. All the css is inlined, the images are base64 encoded, and there's no closing tag. That's one efficient 404!
- rimantas 16y agoAlso: href=//www.google.com/ Title is funny :) I think they could drop margin:0; padding:0 from css, default values in browsers won't change much for this type of page anyway.
- tuxcanfly 16y ago`//www.google.com` will automatically translate the url to http/https depending on the requested protocol.
- Matt_Cutts 16y agoYup, that way of doing it is protocol-agnostic.
- etherealG 16y agois this officially accepted syntax? does it work in all browsers? (I'd really love both these answers to be yes so I can start doing this on my sites)
- davidu 16y agoWhich is interesting since Google doesn't serve a 404 over HTTPS as far as I can tell.
- corin_ 16y agoBut they're clearly doing their best to minimise file size, and so using // cuts down on a few characters.
- windsurfer 16y agoWell maybe they will...?
- lancefisher 16y agoTry this: https://mail.google.com/asdfasdf https://mail.google.com/asdfasdf
- stanleydrew 16y agoNone of the html attribute values are quoted either.
- cstuder 16y agoOne image is inline, the other is a conventional file. I wonder why. Oh, and it validates indeed: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.google.com/notauasdfadf;No200=1 http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.google.com/nota...
- rodh 16y agoMaybe that logo is used elsewhere, and there's a high likelihood for that logo to be in the user's cache.
- estel 16y agoThe other image, the logo, is probably generic enough that it's used elsewhere and a user is likely to have it cached. The other looks bespoke for this page, so wouldn't.
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoI don't understand how it validates - I'd always understood that html, head, [title] and body were required for a complete document. Certainly the draft spec at http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/semantics.html#the-html-element-0 http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/semantics.html#the-html-element-0 appears to confirm this ... Fairplay to them though, they got a semantically and structurally deficient document to validate - it's like the IE6 of webpages ;0)
- nostrademons 16y agoThe elements are required, but the tags are implied by the tag structure of the rest of the document. They're added automatically at parse time: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/tokenization.html#the-before-html-insertion-mode http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/tokenization.html#the-before-html...
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoThat's a strange version of "required". Basically the elements are not required in a document until parse time at which point they are inserted following an extremely arduously defined algorithm. It seems bizarre to me that you wouldn't simply define the location of meta elements strictly as being in the head but instead define that should the parser find them they should be wrapped in to a head element. On a brief view it looks like one can just drop a meta tag, say, in anywhere in the document and the parser has to move this to the head element? I didn't realise that they were encouraging tag soup; this isn't part of the spec I've seen before. This sort of complex parsing algo wasn't in XHTML1.X or HTML4.X was it?
- reedlaw 16y agoDoes every browser support base64 encoded images embedded in css?
- beaumartinez 16y agoI don't think the older ones do; however, I'm sure Google gives them a different 404 page (change your User-Agent to IE6 and see how different the search results HTML is).
- joshfinnie 16y agoWe unfortunate users of IE6 get the new 404 page as well. I assume they just gave up on IE6 like most of the web-world has.
- treeface 16y agoYep here's what I see on our IE6 death machine: http://i.imgur.com/bTXtn.png http://i.imgur.com/bTXtn.png
- elliottcarlson 16y agoWhich could be another indication why the Google logo itself is linked (besides it being in cache as well). The page degrades well imho in IE6 - the lack of the cutsey robot isn't essential to the page - the logo however is.
- cstuder 16y agoAlmost every browser. Guess which ones don't. (I'll give you a hint: It's MSIE 6 and 7.) Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme#Web_browser_support http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme#Web_browser_sup...
- kpreid 16y agoBase64 isn't exactly efficient. (Though it might be more efficient than an additional HTTP request. But if so, why aren't they using it for the homepage logo, say?) I wonder if they're using it as non-useless padding for stopping the IE-overrides-too-short-404s behavior.
- visural 16y agoBase64 is ok when the response is gzipped