It was probably a combination of bad practices. However it came to the traffic layer to fix it because the problem was with many application origins and it would have been a huge horizontal initiative otherwise to address it.
I don't have any examples from the past because I no longer work there but when this middleware was turned off for a few days by ommission, homepage would become 2/3 whitespace. DOM would render correctly of course and the user wouldn't notice anything is wrong however if they were to "View Source", they'd realize they just downloaded a bunch of whitespace.
Imagine having 5 kilobytes of "\n" after each HTML element kind of thing.
When it comes to the middleware, it is just parsing and minifying the HTML source, in the form of an Apache Traffic Server plugin/middleware.
I don't have any examples from the past because I no longer work there but when this middleware was turned off for a few days by ommission, homepage would become 2/3 whitespace. DOM would render correctly of course and the user wouldn't notice anything is wrong however if they were to "View Source", they'd realize they just downloaded a bunch of whitespace.
Imagine having 5 kilobytes of "\n" after each HTML element kind of thing.
When it comes to the middleware, it is just parsing and minifying the HTML source, in the form of an Apache Traffic Server plugin/middleware.