I feel you are forgetting a number of things. - Response times: Response times are every bit as important to Google as bandwidth usage is. A user should never have to wait for the Google page, or the Google search results. Ever. CSS and JavaScript in separate files means the browser needs two roundtrips to server more than currently. If rendering relies on CSS, this means unreliable response times and inevitable slower percieved loading (Try a 14.4 modem on phone lines with high interference and 75+% packet loss - those can make any page seem like it takes an eternity to load). And JavaScript loaded as a separate file means unrealiable script triggering. We wouldn't want to throw an error report in the face of our users just because they don't have the script loaded yet, do we?
- Hidden bandwidth consumption: Google pages, especially the main page, are pretty light weight. Which means the HTTP headers are a considerable part of the bandwidth consumption. You double the amount of HTTP headers to send if you add two external references - both requests and responses. - Obvious bandwidth consumption: We have unneccesarily increased bandwidth consumption from the script and link elements required to reference these new files, as well as from the doctype needed to make the HTML valid. - Localisation: Google has within all probability made their pages so that minimal changes are required even to languages and scripts considerably different from English. This has to be considered for any remake with semantical markup, including the issue of the next point. - Serialisation: Not only do we want our content to be laid out the same in CSS and JavaScript enabled browsers. We also want to retain the current layout/serialisation for the content in browsers with bad or no CSS support, with terminal window textual browsers, screen readers or braille interfaces. Google may throw ugly code at us, but it isn't inaccessible as it is. This includes things such as not laying the Web/Images/Groups... out as a horizontal list instead of a single line when you have no CSS support. - Dynamic elements: Things such as being logged in/not logged in, having Google Desktop or not, sponsored links, search listings etc. all need be take in consideration. -- David "liorean" Andersson <uri:http://liorean.web-graphics.com/> ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
