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It's explained.

> For file size optimization and scannability purposes

Omitting tags means less transfered bytes means faster websites. If the browser can forgivingly parse HTML like this, why not take advantage of it?

Of course, it doesn't sit well with me either. This'll take some time to digest, but it is interesting to consider.

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I know it all adds up, but stripping <html><head></head><body></body></html> seems like a miniscule saving compared to the huge amounts of cruft stuffed into most websites.

That's true. Presumably this is for extreme cases when you really need that extra bit of performance.

Perhaps HTML could have been better designed with performance in mind. Every tag you open (i.e. <foo>) you're supposed to close (i.e. </foo>) which is quite redundant in terms of bytes when you think about it. It is easy to imagine markup languages that minimize the number of bytes the client has to transfer.

Chrome does, what about the other smaller browsers?

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