Re: Ten ways to speed up the download time of your website

On 17:49:44 13 July 2004 Trenton wrote:

10. Use / at the end of directory links
Don’t do this: <a href="http://www.URL.com/directoryname">

Do this instead: <a href="http://www.URL.com/directoryname/">

Why? If there’s no slash at the end of the URL the browser doesn’t know if the link is pointing to a file or to a directory. By including the slash the browser instantly knows that the URL is pointing to a directory and doesn’t need to spend any time trying to work it out.

While its a good practice to apply consistent naming (either always use / or never), I am dubious about any performance gains on the client side as its the server's job to decide if requested URL actually needs to be listing of files in a directory or a file. Don't forget that the main bottleneck on the Internet is connectivity between client and server, and thus things that require a nano-second of calculations on either side are not that important from performance point of view.

I also disagree that <tables> should be avoided - lets not forget that World Wide Web is inhabited by other species than humans, and this fixation on pretty rendering does not take into account complexity that will have to tackled by automated bots (robots). For example fancy CSS might make look certain text bold but search engines that don't understand CSS will fail to appreciate significant of words that were "bolded". Table format is ideal for programs that take data from HTML and put it into database or Excel spreadsheet.

Designing not just for human eyes but for machines is essential to achieve success.

regards,

Alex