The Thin Long Line! :)

The size of the page is less and then the download time minor.

There are no benifits....
This is probaly because of the editer they used, or source was crated with a script and they did not add line breaks

forgot to tell you, that this method may be ideal if you don't want someone to steal your code! it is REALY discourging to find that you are about to copy a very long line of code!

any effects on the layout of the page?

This is usually the result of a page that wasn't written in straight html but generated by asp or php or cf.  It takes extra time to put in special characters to include carriage returns and tabs while spitting out html.  In ASP, one might use vbCrLf to get the carriage return/linefeed while in PHP someone may put in Chr(13)Chr(10) to have it insert a carriage return linefeed.

I would be interested in whether the extension on the page was html based or server language based.

I agree that it makes it harder for someone to steal code, while they still can steal it, there is extra work involved.

However, it is bad form as an HTML writer to have code that is unreadable.

I agree with hkmdj.  It is most likely output from some program.  Using perl with cgi is the same way.  It takes extra code to output those eol's, and since it wouldn't normally have any effect on the layout of the page they skip it (I don't however).

Also, it can reduce download time.  I've seen some pages that go to the other extreme and have WAY too much white space in their file and takes an extra minute just to download all the garbage html.  So to decrease download is also a possiblity, but it's not a very good idea, since then you either have to either keep a copy of the original file (making it necesary to have two files for every page on your site), or you have to try and update an unreadable page...

Basically, it's not usually a good idea...

-Josh

1)
The purpose of doing using this technique is to reduce the amount of spaces, tabs, carriage returns in the source file. This reduces the file size and hence the download time.
(As mentioned: it may also be the result of a CGI program generating HTML without newlines, etc.)
2)
There are programs that do strip out white space in your source (sorry don't know what they are called off-hand).
3)
Depending on the contents of your HTML document, it can affect the layout of the page, but in many cases won't.
Having the <pre> tag will seriously affect the layout.
So too will conversions like:
<table>...</table>
<table>...</table>
being converted to
<table>...</table><table>...</table>
(Likewise for other Document Objects.)

That's what I was wondering...

Thanks for the answer.