removing white space from html

[onelife]

Hi all,

I use frontpage to create my sites, yeah I know I'm probably taking the easy route and all but I'm a novice.

Anyway when using frontpage I noticed that you can remove white space, generator ids, tags etc when publishing the site to the net. Would doing this have any detrimental effect on search results?

Your enlightenment would be greatly appreciated.

Dave

[KeithO]

I believe it would help. There are theories about code to content ratios and having extra garbage tags removed would help.

[onelife]

Cheers Keith,

That is the kind of answer I'm looking for. Can anyone add to this or do they know otherwise?

[thebloke]

In my experience, and from a programmers point of view, the code frontpage generates is like spaghetti. Trying to read it myself is bad enough let alone a robot.

Fair enough, if you want to knock up your sites easily then use it but grab yourself a html book and take some time to strip out the unnecessary junk that frontpage seems to throw in there for no good reason.

[onelife]

Thanks for all your input guys!

I have had it mentioned a few times that frontpages code isn't that clean. But to be honest I wouldn't know the difference - I'm a personal trainer not a programmer.

Back to removing white space, tags etc, does work in one's favour or against them?

Cheers all,

[khurramali]

Removing extra tags, code and white space do help.

Cleanly written html code certainly looks professional.

I should also add that using External Style Sheets CSS, also Help toward this goal of clean code.

Separation of Formatting and Text is good practice.