News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly. Parent comment

Re:Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly by leif on Wednesday March 02, 2011 @12:55PM (#2280436)
Google's most frequently accessed pages (most prominently, the homepage itself) are designed by a team of pretty high-level engineers, to reduce latency and bandwidth requirements, by stripping bytes. Every change is reviewed with extreme scrutiny. I'm sure the 404 page was designed with similar care.

If you view source, for example, the image is base64 encoded, and they don't even bother closing their tags on the page, because that's more bytes and the browsers don't notice. This was very carefully engineered.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly by TorbjornLunde on Wednesday March 02, 2011 @03:09PM (#2281061)
Seems weird to have Arial in the font-stack, as Arial is the default font for sans-serif on Windows. (And Helvetica on OS X which has the same metrics.)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly by leif on Wednesday March 02, 2011 @10:16PM (#2282624)
Google uses Arial in the font stack across all of their pages, for consistency. I assume the following rationale is at least mostly correct.

In case a computer doesn't have that as the default for some reason, they don't want their page to look any different, if it is possible for the computer to display it correctly, because if it doesn't, it affects their brand image.

Imagine if you did a google search and everything looked just a little bit off (and you weren't a developer so you didn't know why): you might think someone was hacking google and stealing your information or changing your results. Consistency builds trust, and this is important to them.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly by switch007 on Wednesday March 02, 2011 @01:56PM (#2280682)
Why did they not remove whitespace too?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly by beaumartinez on Wednesday March 02, 2011 @03:42PM (#2281206)
I'm guessing it's not much of an issue when it's sent compressed over the wire.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly by colanderman on Wednesday March 02, 2011 @09:11PM (#2282394)
Neither are closing tags...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly by colanderman on Wednesday March 02, 2011 @11:45PM (#2282857)
Who in the world downvoted this, please own up? Can you show that gzip does not, in fact, perform well at compressing repeated strings of text such as the likes of closing tags?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly by leif on Thursday March 03, 2011 @12:54AM (#2283004)
Wasn't me, but why make gzip do the work when you can do it once, easily, yourself? Sure it can do it, but their servers can serve the closing tags, and google strips those. The discrepancy is weird is all.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly by leif on Wednesday March 02, 2011 @01:57PM (#2280683)
No idea, I saw that too and was puzzled.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly by asymmetric on Wednesday March 02, 2011 @02:34PM (#2280869)
don't knkow if it's firefox inserting them, but i do see closing tags, apart from <p> elements, but that's allowed.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly by jedsmith on Wednesday March 02, 2011 @03:31PM (#2281158)
There is no <head>, </head>, <body>, </body>, or </html>.
[ Parent | on HN ]