> 2. Do you really need more than one tracker? Does anybody need 14 trackers?
Marketing answer: yes. GA and Omniture do different things/generate different reports. Each tracker usually does one critical thing better/differently than the last, so it's really easy for marketing to say they want all of them.
> 3. "Social" buttons don't need to communicate with the social network unless pushed.
Yes they do, because tracking.
> 6. Run your code through an HTML validator, just to check for cruft.
5KB of html cruft is nothing compared to the massive amounts of JS cruft being loaded (your point #2). This is wasted effort imo.
Marketing answer: yes. GA and Omniture do different things/generate different reports. Each tracker usually does one critical thing better/differently than the last, so it's really easy for marketing to say they want all of them.
> 3. "Social" buttons don't need to communicate with the social network unless pushed.
Yes they do, because tracking.
> 6. Run your code through an HTML validator, just to check for cruft.
5KB of html cruft is nothing compared to the massive amounts of JS cruft being loaded (your point #2). This is wasted effort imo.