This is especially true if you are using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web design package such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver. These programs will speed up your web site creation, but they are not that efficient at writing clean html code.

We will be focusing this discussion on actual html coding, ignoring other programming languages that may be used in a page such as JavaScript. In code examples I will be using ( and ) characters instead of correct html so that code examples will display properly in this newsletter.

Up until recently when coding a page in HTML we would be using tags such as (font) tag and (p) paragraph tags. Between these tags would be our page content, text, images and links. Each time a formatting change was made on page new tags were needed with complete formatting for new section. More recently we have gained ability to use Cascading Style Sheets, allowing us to write formatting once and then refer to that formatting several times within a web page.

In order to speed up page load times we need to have fewer characters on page when viewed in an html editor. Since we really do not want to remove any of our visible content we need to look to html code. By cleaning up this code we can remove characters, thereby creating a smaller web page that will load more quickly.

Over time HTML has changed and we now have many different ways to do same thing. An example would be code used to show a bold type face. In HTML we have two main choices, (strong) tag and (b) tag. As you can see (strong) tag uses 5 more characters than (b) tag, and if we consider closing tags as well we see that using (strong)(/strong) tag pair uses 10 more characters than cleaner (b)(/b) tag pair.

This is our First Principle of clean HTML code: Use simplest coding method available.

HTML has ability of nesting code within other code. For instance we could have a line with three words where middle word was in bold. This could be accomplished by changing formatting completely each time visible formatting changes. Consider this code:

(font face=”times”)This(/font) (font face=”times”)(strong)BOLD(/strong)(/font) (font face=”times”)Word(/font) This takes up 90 characters.

The movie Extra Terrestrial (ET) coined phrase “phone home” and each year American’s look for more cost effective ways to do just that. The past 10 years have seen development and growing popularity of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies to achieve cost savings over traditional circuit-switched telephone networks. The two dominate technologies used for VoIP are: (1) Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and (2) Peer-2-Peer (P2P). For business and educational institutions SIP VoIP solutions have produced substantial savings. For home voice users, however, SIP VoIP is still value challenged.

A typical circuit-switched landline phone costs about $19.95 per month (plus tax). The good old American landline phone should be graphically depicted beside word “reliable” in dictionary. Not only does it keep working, even when all electrical power fails, but it can even provide you with a light to dial with. At $15 dollars per month SIP VoIP is still value challenged due to lack of full support for E9-1-1 emergency services and of course reliability issues inherent with using a real time application over a “best effort” network like today's Internet. Although few VoIP articles still reference Internet Request For Comments (RFC) 3714 “IAB Concerns Regarding Congestion Control,” technical challenges associated with VoIP are widely known. Further, even with recent dubious edict by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that VoIP service providers will provision support for E9-1-1 within 90 days, this still leaves reliability issues unresolved. The use of adaptive rate CODEC’s to prevent congestion collapse is a swell idea if it applies to my neighbor’s service but not my own. Using adaptive rate CODEC’s to elicit voluntary user preemption has no appeal in modern world. Technology is supposed to be getting better and it is clearly not better that users receive disconnects or degraded service quality in order to constrain network bandwidth consumption.