Some people here actually run popular web sites. When you're serving millions of requests a day, a few KB of difference in page size can make quite a bit of difference on how much you pay for bandwidth...
Not to mention that when a browser doesn't render the page correctly, some people don't like wading through thousands of lines of div-soup when they could be debugging one hundred and fifty lines of markup instead...
You really are idiots if you're worried about 'that much text' going over the internet. You have no concept of data.