Should the source be beautiful or ugly?

So, this is sort of an opinion question. But should the source code appear beautiful (with even spacing of text, lines, etc.) or ugly (where everything is everywhere)?

There is an advantage to beautiful code and that is that it appears to look more professional.

However, the advantage to ugly code is that most will have a hard time trying to copy your site, etc. and that does slim down the file size by a bit.

What about in terms of SEO? Will search engines crawl beautiful codes faster than ugly ones?

 

It doesn't matter in term of SEO.

But clean and proper coding make the site easy to update, maintain... especially when there will be more than one guy working on the site.

 

^^thats right... but of course if you can make your code more shorter much better.. try to save some script as different file and just call it your page, since some scripts are crawlable... this can help bots to crawl the page faster..

 

I prefer my code to look clean and organized.

 

Clean and proper coding all the way. Nowadays I don't think that "stealing" code is an issue. There is nothing that you could have in you page that is not in another place or coudn'd be leard easly (unless we are takling about some fancy fancy javascript functions)

 

More of the consideration is not people "stealing it" but the fact that the comments/ line spaces etc all add bytes to the file size which impacts speed of loading (minimal) and bandwidth useage.

For your average hobby/ SME site it is next to nothing and so not really an issue. For a large corporate site receiving millions of page hits per day it can make a noticable cost difference in bandwidth.

Interestingly with Ajax.Net the code for production and debugging is different - debug is nicely spaced and commented. Production the complete 1000+ line js file is written as a single line with not a single unnecessary space etc.

 

imho - if the site was built for a client, the source code should be written in such a way that the webmaster after you doesn't have to waste a lot of time trying to figure it out.

 

Interestingly most of the major commercial sites do not have nice, easily readable code.

 

it should be beautiful imo.

proper spacing, tabs etc.

as if it was a c++/jave etc program.

 

Clean, easy to read code is always the way to go for me. I don't think there is any benefit in making code "sloppy" to ward off stealing, if someone really wants to take it at best you'll slow them down a bit.

 

Hey!
Ugly codes need love too.

 

Yeah, I would definitely say that your code need to be clean and organized. It will be easier for you to make changes, updates, etc... even if someone can copy it, it does not mean that their site will be successful.

 

Thats because they think of it as a layer of security.

Scares away script-kiddies, and people who wish to steal source Also you see a lot of sites with "one-lined" source, which is basically a compression method.

They strip out like all the spaces, and comments to make the file smaller. Small difference in size, however, with the amount of traffic they recieve, it's going to lighten their bandwidth usage.

 

On the topic of comments. I have gotten into the habit of indexing all comments to reduce load speed on pages. For example:

on my php page -

<?php request_file(....) ?> //c. 34


and on my comment indexer

//c. 34
Blah Blah Blah

While I think in some cases comments are necessary, when a client requests them, I prefer this method.

 

I like clean and organized code. When looking at other sites that I like, I tend to respect other webmasters more when they have a nice site, but also spent a lot of time organizing and cleaning their code. It also helps in finding tiny mistakes and mispellings in your codes which can help in SEO....

 

Well spaced and indented code here. Does anyone have a good tutorial on indenting HTML? Sorry, i dont mean to steal your thread.

 

Personally i'll make a sites code look as beautiful as I want it to. If someone wants to copy the site then they will, no point in trying to stop it unless you really want to get into legal issues, etc.

 

Mimicry is the best form of flattery. So why not just make it pretty for people to copy!

 

But then who would know and how could you tell which is the original code?

 

Should be w3 compliant. Period.