Well, [D-Tail], converting an existing site to XHTML Strict isn't a trivial task, so I wasn't really serious about that . And IMHO the msx.org site has seen a lot of improvement already... For example it runs in 'Standards Compliance' mode nowadays, many of the presentation has been moved to CSS, and the issues I see showing up with the frontpage only have to do with character entities and encoding.

However ofcourse a good next step would be to get rid of all the "colspan='2' bgcolor='#c0c0c0'"-like presentational attributes and stop using all those nested tables... Should save a fair lot of bandwidth too.

Anyways, back to RSS, I added RSS to my own site just now (which is fyi XHTML with application/xhtml+xml), so now at least I can comment knowing what it is to have a RSS feed on your page .


~Grauw

Ehm, something's wrong with your server. FireFox asks me what to do with the PHP file... Bad MIME type afterall?

EDIT: ow, it's the RSS feed itself.... Never mind then!

BTW: i really like the layout of that page! Nice work!

Talking about quotes in HTML: this is a very good article:
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/quotes-in-html.html

Indeed, manuel!

I recently created 'auto-intelligent-quoting' for my site's blog as well... Not for the reasons mentioned in that article, but for typographic reasons, but ah... . The article raises some nice points though.

But, a different topic now:

I've been looking into the msx.org's html... The frontpage as it is now is 53kB. By CSS-ing everything, removing all table shit and replacing it with a more structured markup (which is also much easier to apply CSS to) without presentational shit nor excessive tables. The end result was a front page of 31kB, with still room for a byte or two improvement. So the page's size was roughly spoken halved. It also loads much nicer, without seeing the tables render, and faster of course.

Based on the number of visitors Netstat reports per month, it would already save 3 GB of traffic each month assuming each visitor views the frontpage once only! Which certainly isn't a very realistic scenario, because people will browse the site, and I for example also tend to reload now and again to see if there's something new (when I'm not using RSS, of course ). So I think you can multiply that number by a factor of... well, I really wouldn't know.

A quick look at the forum (my guess is the pages most viewed) showed there isn't as much to gain there as on the frontpage, but there should be something to gain there as well.

I've put an example online of what it would be. Note that I didn't want to spend too much time on it so it's only a rough sketch and far from all details are taken care of (and also there are some challenges - the twin small posts being one ), but this captures the general idea. I did add a tiny little tweak to the menu though ;p. Take a look at it in Mozilla Firefox, because the last thing on my mind was to make sure everything works in IE (a quick check showed it did though). While you're in Firefox, also try to click on the palette icon in the status bar to switch to the 'MRC Simple' style to see how easily it can get a very different look. That also shows how the site would degrade nicely on low-end devices.

So, if cutting bandwidth costs will be an issue sometime in the future, give me a call .


~Grauw

p.s. this one tag I encountered made me kinda laugh: <font class='...'> ;p.

As the 'big MRC improvements' so far often were combined with server-moves time hasn't always been on my side when it comes to optimizing the HTML output. We've already come a long way. Sone font tags have slipped bag in though, I'll remove them shortly. Most important thing with the latest improvement was getting 95% of the website HTML transitional compatible, standards compliance mode, and I think we managed

As for the amount of bandwidth to be saved with your proposal: as we're using gzip the amount of bandwidth we'll actually save will actually be quite a lot lower, but it'll be interesting to have a look at such improvements anyway. Firefox doesn't quite show the frontpage as I want it to with your current optimization (the small newsposts are no longer the same size), but that's something that should be not too hard to fix I suppose. Further output-optimizations are somewhere at the very bottom of the famous MRC ToDo list, so I don't know when I'll ever get to it, if ever Improving the webshop (ghe) and fixing the RSS feeds have higher priorities atm.

Quote:

I've been looking into the msx.org's html... The frontpage as it is now is 53kB. By CSS-ing everything, removing all table shit and replacing it with a more structured markup (which is also much easier to apply CSS to) without presentational shit nor excessive tables. The end result was a front page of 31kB, with still room for a byte or two improvement.

Dude, you wasted time doing THAT?! ^^;;;

/me really sad right now...

Sure, I don't expect it to be any kind of priority . I just wanted to give it a go to see how well it worked, and how much difference it would make, out of personal interest on the subject. So that I (and you) can have some numbers on how much transforming a 'Transitional' into a 'Strict' page would save... If say, 90% of the bandwidth usage is generated by HTML pages it could matter a great deal. If you happen to have any numbers about that by the way, I would be interested to hear about them. That way I can get a general impression about the impact of such things on a typical site.

About the looks: don't mind them, I just tried to quickly make it resemble msx.org somewhat, in order to see what hooks needed to be present in the underlying code to be able to apply it (classes/id's, structure, etc.). Wasn't particularly looking at making an exact replica of the site... And that thing about making the small newsposts same-sized is actually not that simple -_-;; I'd have to experiment to see which approach is best (that's why I didn't bother). But my guess is that it's quite doable. Actually I have something in mind already .

Guyver: maybe it's a waste of time in your eyes but I liked doing it.

~Grauw

Quote:

Guyver: maybe it's a waste of time in your eyes but I liked doing it.

I understand that... I would like doing it as well, optimizing stuff is always fun.

But in our particular case, we're part of a team that is trying to get something finished and things like these, as you say, should not "be any kind of priority"!

I'd like to do 'full-time' development on BiOS and other projects, but I can't due to other priorities.

Quote:

Originally posted by Rikusu in this forum thread START CODING!

^^;