dummied

What I'm talking about

At a glance

This entry was written on November 18, 2005.

The entry prior to this is entitled Full-frontal content.

The entry following this is entitled Making Movable Type fluid.

There are 0 comments on this post.

This entry has been tagged as CSS, Work, examples.

Archives are also available.

I wasn't planning on going back to the bad newspaper web design well quite so soon, but I stumbled upon a perfect case study of the benefits of clean, mostly table-free markup.

And in the same town no less.

There's The Washington Post, which has a worst-of-both-worlds (divitis and presentational tables if you can believe that) mess of a tag soup home page, and then there's the crosstown Washington Times, which is mostly table-free.

The Washington Post, source-only mind you, runs 136KB large. This number is just the page itself. I haven't taken the time yet to go rooting around through their CSS and/or javascript (though as much as they have jammed inline, it's hard to imagine what they've got stored elsewhere).

The Times, on the other hand, is 52KB.

Two newspapers in the same town. One is trying to get it.

The other's just throwing investor money away hand over fist.

Let's take the Post at it's word that it get 5 million unique visitors per month. And let's say that if they cleaned up their code, they'd get their page size down to right around what the Times is already sitting at. If you carry the 1 and divide by 1,048,576, by my calculations, the Post could be saving 420GB of bandwidth per month ...

On their front page alone.

I know bandwidth is fairly cheap, but it doesn't make sense to me that an industry that everyone says is dying would throw any money away like this when a solution is readily available.

Just trimming down page size would save companies like the Post significant amounts of money in bandwidth and storage. Their pages would load faster, be more accessible to people with disabilities and search engines, and be significantly easier to manage and update.

It's seems every time I get curious and view source on a newspaper website, I just end up wanting to bang my head against the sharp corner of a metal desk.

The Times is far from perfect mind you. They have one small table on the page and even use the marquee tag. But they're trying, and I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, especially when their page has an XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype and comes to closest of almost any newspaper website I've looked at to validating. In the world of newspaper websites, 70-some validation errors is almost a blessing.

So, here's to the Times. I may not agree with their politics, but I'm a burgeoning fan of their web department.

Now, if they'd just get rid of that damn marquee.