I definitely made use of “View Source” in my early years. It was indispensable at the time. Yes there was a lot of hackish stuff going on, but I think that was more due to the maturity of the field rather than the use of view source itself.

Nowadays, though, there is a lot that’s not part of the initial HTML download, and the DOM is likely going to look fairly different after loading than is reflected in the initial HTML load. When people ask me for tips on learning, I tell them to use FireBug to take a look at the larger picture of how a site works. That said, for me View Source is only partly a technical feature, it’s also an attitude. With the first Web sites, anyone could do it and sharing was somewhat of an expectation. As such, even if other tools make the feature less useful, I think it should stay if for no other reason than as an invitation to explore and share.

In wordprocessors-land this is the “Show Codes”-feature in WP5.1.

Still people to this day complain:

I wish I could do “Show Codes” like in WP5.1, because I don’t understand what is going on in this wordprocessor.

I think this is espcially true for compressed, but if you do compressed I doubt you need to remove all new lines and spacing to be efficient. If I remember correctly if you do both compression and remove comments, newlines and spacing. The first one has the biggest impact and the other doesn’t matter as much anymore.

Does anyone have any link to a recent benchmark testing this ?

Yes, they do and it’s a cause of disasters. “trained” monkeys more like! If you don’t know how to do something, then performing a cargo-cult ritual that you’ve seen someone else performing will not invoke the software gods!

LEARN for dog’s sake!

View Source is useless. Where’s the “View Source” for my word processor, or accounting app, or…..?

I feel that view source is of critical importance to the web both historically and in the future.

I’ve blogged a more detailed response to your and Alex’s post:
http://thomasjbradley.ca/blog/save-view-source

And I would like to start a movement:

Save View Source!
http://saveviewsource.org

1) It’s a quick and easy way to pre-screen contractors – ask for a reference that they worked on, and check their code.

2) For server-side technologies where the source code is in ASP.NET or PHP, using view source is helpful for refining templates and checking for standards compliance.

@slightlyoff: “the web should be improving fast enough that minification never provides enough value to *most* developers that it’s even on their roadmap”
That’s unrealistic
“Anything else should be viewed as a categorical platform-wide failure to keep up.”
And that’s just drastic
But I guess to each his own.

View Source was easily available when Web 2.0 was young, it cannot be that easy now when Web2.0 is the essential technology being used in a commercial environment.

Regards

What better way to learn, than to see something cool, and then open up the hood to see how it’s done.

I think that his hypothesis is somewhat off the mark, which, if I’m reading him correctly, states that view-source was instrumental to the proliferation of HTML and web development. I would instead argue that it was the simple nature of HTML that led to its proliferation, and view-source is just a nice, nay great, side effect of this simplicity.

Consider that HTML is at once simpler and more powerful (at least on the immediate gratification scale) than scripting languages. Not only does it not require any compiling, but it doesn’t even need any “manual output” (i.e. things like “print”, “echo”, etc.). You write the tags, you load the file in browser, you see the “tags” (i.e. their content). It’s almost like a formatted text file, which is of course why view-source works so well.

If you compare this to PHP for a second, a code like “echo $yada . ‘-’ . $bla;” may produce text such as “view-source” but the mapping is not direct since when looking at the source PHP code you need to find the declarations/assignments of the $yada and $bla variables, which may be a line above, or 100 lines above, or constructed inside a function in a different file by means of a complex algorithm.
HTML doesn’t have that – the contents of tags is exactly what you see on the page and the only “variable” is their styling and position.

Of course, the more complex websites become, the more complex code they require. JS introduces a more traditional scripting code, and to optimize user experience we minify and obfuscate it, essentially removing that almost 1 to 1 mapping of source code to the page in a browser. But I think that’s just the nature of the beast – you can’t have complex interactive experience while maintaining simple readable code (unless you have an extra abstraction layer on top of it).

That’s not to say that there aren’t those that try to specifically prevent others from peaking inside their code, but I believe such developers are in the minority. We just have to make sure that the open source nature of the web remains as such.

View source did a lot to spread HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Without it the web would have been just another hypertext system and probably we’d not here writing about it now.

My point is, there’s a lot more readily available information on how to develop for the web out there than there was when View Source was perhaps at the height of its importance. Not that it’s not important anymore, but I’d say less-so than it once did.