4 ms·

Ask HN: What is with Rotten Tomatoes' HTML Source?

• slater 16y ago
  Only time I've seen that happen was with ColdFusion or Java-powered sites that don't strip the lines used by inline logic, eg where you see 10 empty lines, there might be an if/else snippet running. At runtime, the language runs through those parts, but keeps the space intact.
• camtarn 16y ago
  If you mean the crazy amount of whitespace, it may be caused by a templating system. For instance, in JSP JSTL: <c:choose> <c:when test="${!empty article}"> <c:out value="${article}"/> </c:when> <c:when test="${!empty comments}"> <c:out value="${article}"/> </c:when> </c:choose> Each of the choose/when tags has a newline after it, so even though the tag is not output into the resulting HTML source, it causes a literal newline to be emitted. This doesn't normally matter, since HTML collapses multiple runs of whitespace into a single space. However, for places where you can't have any whitespace (like the middle of a word) you can work around that by concatenating all the tags into one long line, or by strange arrangements of opening/closing angle brackets: <c:choose ><c:when test="..." ><c:out ... / ></c:when ></c:choose> Some webservers like Tomcat also provide the ability to strip all excess outgoing whitespace, which preserves the readability of the source files.
• byoung2 16y ago
  I use smarty, and making the template logic readable sometimes leaves extra newlines and whitespace. You can wrap {strip}{/strip} tags around it to remove it though. This is what I use to get all code in a single line as on http://www.dealspyer.com http://www.dealspyer.com