TechPulse 360

Under Marissa Mayer's designer jacket was Google's latest geeky t-shirt: HTML wants to be square!

What if Web browsing was as fast as flipping through a magazine?

Well that’s the dream that Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer shared this morning with the attendees of O’Reilly’s Velocity conference.

And how Google plans to achieve that?

First, says Mayer, is by working on several front simultaneously: the browser, the back-end servers and the Web page design.

More specifically, on the Web page design side, Mayer gave a few useful tips:

1. HTML wants to be square. “I love rounding corners [with CSS for example] as the next person does but if it actually costs usage and ultimately costs revenue then it can often be changed, tweaked and refined,” said Mayer;
2. Images 101. Smaller is better and compression is your “friend”!
3. Tables are purely evil. Mayer compares HTML table rendering to Flash rendering, which loads the entire content before rendering the page.

Mayer also pointed to Google’s new site Speed where you can see “tech talks” and set of tools used internally at Google to make its pages load faster.

“Our goal really is to try and make browsing the Web as fast as browsing a magazine. What would it feel like if all the content on the page you are about to click through to was already loaded… We think people will use the Web a lot more… And do more search,” explains Mayer.

Here’s a video excerpt of Mayer going through the design tricks: