Speaking of sites considering a move to modern design techniques:
<http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot/>
<http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/21/2223256>
Sample of the current Slashdot site, and the proposed redesign:
<http://www.alistapart.com/d/slashdot/old_index.html>
<http://www.alistapart.com/d/slashdot/index.html>
Note how fast that page loads. Now that isn't exactly a fair observation,
since this version isn't running all the Perl code & making all the
database queries that the real site presumably runs on each page load. But
even still, note that the revised version is 20% smaller, and yet appears
to be identical in most browsers. If nothing else there is that much of a
bandwidth saving, but my hunch (again, untested at the moment) is that the
revised version should also render more quickly, and perform better on a
wider variety of platforms (PDAs, phones, Lynx, etc).
Actually, testing them with the 'links' text browser -- which does a
tolerably good job of putting tables together -- this revision ends up
putting several secreens of page furniture before the actual content
begins. A better implementation might put the interesting parts of the
page at or near the end of the page's HTML source, so that browsers like
this put the core content ahead of things like navigation links. (Better
still, a future version of links could become aware of CSS layout and the
problem would just go away...).
In any case, it's another interesting case study to examine.
--
Chris Devers
