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Comment by bazoom42 | Hacker News Reader

What? Upppercase and lowercase occupy the same amount of bits. ASCII uses 7 bits for all characters (although in practice 8 bits).

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Some developers today think CSS-in-JS is a good idea. Web devs also wanted HTML to look and parse like XML. Backend devs also thought RPC with XML envelopes (SOAP) was the path forward.

Developers in all time periods have held curious ideas that appear ludicrous with hindsight.

It is just objectively incorrect that using uppercase saves space.

As someone who always used uppercase for tags back in the day, it wasn't about saving space; it was to improve human readability. All caps tags stood out better against the backdrop of mostly lower case prose. Also the DOM APIs case-folded to upper when inspecting an HtmlElement object's name.

To be honest, this is the first I heard that folks thought it had space advantages.

In the early days of computing ASCII was not universally used and often character spaces were less than 8 bits and lacked lower-case, or were mixed charsets like PETSCII that had upper-case letters and the extra charspace were filled with graphics. For a text-only system you could store the doc with 6 bit chars since you could ignore the upper charspace populated with graphics.

Was this ever true for HTML?

This was long before HTML though. HTML was always at least ASCII.

Indeed, but many of the people writing early HTML came up that era and often those habits remain.

You mean they wrote web pages with all the text in ALL CAPS? I highly doubt this was ever common.

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