Have you looked at the comments in a PM page? Here are all the comments from the landing page:

<!-- Took this out for IE6ites "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.
+dtd" -->
    <!-- Theme : Web safe blue PerlMonks Theme    -->
    <!-- No CSS Link in User Settings -->
    <!-- No CSS Data in User Settings -->
<!-- monktainer -->
<!-- monkbar2001 -->
<!-- /monkbar2001 -->
<!-- Begin title bar -->
        <!-- superdoc title chooser(1) -->
        <!-- /superdoc title chooser(1) -->
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        <!-- superdoc title chooser(2) -->
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[download]

• Commented out code for IE
• The name of the CSS theme which is already listed at the top of the CSS file.
• No CSS Link in shows us 2 external sources were not configured. Why does a normal end user need to know this?
• Information about different parts of the header and title bar
• Start a Post with TITLE, REPLIES, AUTHOR, DATE fields
• The post comments repeat with slight variations.
• Nodelets have breaks!
• A commented out link
• Containers are closing

That reads like a list of debug statements. It is not a good practice to emit debug statements in production software. Commented out code should never stay around, we have version control for tracking changes. In addition, these comments provide no direct value to the general users of PM. Users are here to ask/answer/learn about Perl not focus on the markup for the content that was delivered to them. There are sites specifically designed for that purpose like CSS Zen Garden.

So saving bandwidth is good but we should not do it because PM does not need to change. Right. Delivering a smaller HTML page and CSS files makes the PM experience better. Faster page loads always make users happy and slower pages make users look for alternatives.

This suggestion is not the "best" idea. It would require changes to the server software for processing each page on a per user basis. A simpler solution is just to take snapshots of a few pages, do a writeup and include those pages with the writeup on PM itself which is much easier work then editing the server software to add new features. Users can still study how PM works without sending data that is meaningless to most to all users.

A flippant statement to prop up a strawman argument. Making statements like this just makes you look bad, point of fact.

That reads like a list of debug statements. It is not a good practice to emit debug statements in production software.

And yet, everybody does it. Our good friends in PHP-land have plenty of well-known applications that emit debug statements in many places, as well. Of course, they are PHP users, and PHP people have a rather narrow mindset(but that is a different story), so that might be acceptable to them.


Users are here to ask/answer/learn about Perl not focus on the markup for the content that was delivered to them.

Notice how you basically ruined the foundation of your suggestion?

By the way, did you know that you could also shorten the class names on the elements using them? For example, instead of .pmsig, we could make it .pms. Oh, we would save so many kilobytes on long threads!

~Thomas~
confess( "I offer no guarantees on my code." );