Thanks for the share.

id and class attributes should be of hugely greater priority than comments when trying to shave bytes off the markup length.

And indeed they are. My use of the word “leaner” in the section on reducing ID and class names was actually an indication not to byte size but to grouping, and upon a second reading after reading your comment I do see how that sentence could cause a misinterpretation. I could have picked a better word there.

Zapruder, you don’t need to comment every closing tag, just the ones that are non-obvious in your document. It just so happens that these are also typically the ones you want to include either ID or class names or some other metadata about, so I find that in practice this actually works out rather conveniently. :)

…there are many other things that SEO efforts should be focused on that will garner far greater net gains than using only fully-qualified or absolute URIs.

Nicely put — sounds good to me.

There are perhaps parallels with the SEO case made for semantic markup. There are good enough reasons to markup semantically without falling into the trap of overstating the SEO benefits.

Thanks for your answer.

Another case in which they sometimes prefer absolute URIs is when the URI itself is keyword-rich. In these cases, linking from one page of an article series to another with a relative URI might omit this perceived-as-valuable portion of the URI. Once again, I’ve never seen evidence that this is a major weighting factor in SEO results, and I’ve personally never encountered any major problems using one method over the other (and I have tried both over the years).

Finally, I’ll say that there are many other things that SEO efforts should be focused on that will garner far greater net gains than using only fully-qualified or absolute URIs. I can make the argument that writing “beautiful” markup is like using fresh food as ingredients for your dinner. That is to say, you could spend $50,000 on an SEO campaign which would do just as much for you as spending $5,000 on getting your markup “right” from the start.

I hope this is what you were asking, yes? :) In any event, it was a good question! Thanks for the comment.

The only tip that’s new to me is the first one. Your point is well made, but I’ve heard it said on several occasions that there are SEO benefits to using absolute URIs. To do so would I guess be a case of the cart leading the horse in terms of beautiful markup, but would you care to comment?

And on the note of humans still writing HTML, your second point about someone scraping content wholesale from a site without editing it is also good. But if you expect people to do something like that, then I’d consider that situation to be “your own content will be published over multiple protocols.” In this case, that protocol just happens to be content-thievery://. :)

There’s little reason to encode a link with a URI such as http://example.com/my-page/ when /my-page/ will do.

I can think of one and it’s served me in the past: if someone copies content wholesale from your site without editing it, and that content includes full links to other pages on your site, it’ll often raise a flag in the form of trackbacks to the offending pages.

In your example of a quote from a Barack Obama speech, if the quote is preceded by a heading or a sentence that introduces the quote, I’d think the title attribute would be redundant, and keep in mind that while most sighted people might not be affected by such duplication if they don’t hover over the element, screenreader users might hear the same content twice.