If you view the source on any product page you have around 100 lines of whitespace and the <title> isn't found until line 3,500-ish<p>Not to mention all of their CSS is inline<p>Why is it like this? It seems to me it is far more complex than it needs to be
How is this crazy?<p>* Newlines seperating HTML tags (check)<p>* Semi-semantic class and id names (check)<p>* Can read it with raw view-source (check)<p>You wanna see something really crazy? View-source on this one:<p><a href="https://plus.google.com/101139676677179148632/about?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/101139676677179148632/about?hl=en</a>
I would suppose when you see a page from Amazon, there are numbers of the system that contributes to the page. Some with HTML, some with API. And as other commenter mentions, these are all generated by some backend system. Probably no one has to full control on how to format HTML at the front. Or they probably can, but with a lot of meetings.<p>The store front probably just gather all this stuff to produce the final page that you see.