February 11, 2003
Since I went to the meetup not too long ago, I decided to try to make my LJ page look a little less crappy. Easier said that done.
The journal is such a convoluted mess of deprecated tags and non-semantic information that it's damn near impossible to say "style this one way, but style that another." I realize that not everyone is on IE 6 or Netscape 7, and that some things like the nested-table layout are necessary. But using a combination of style information and semantic tags (<H1>, <H2>, <P>, etc.) instead of garbage like the <FONT> tags they have scattered everywhere would make the layout so simple to change, instead of all the hoop-jumping I had to do. It'd also add the advantage of drastically reducing the page's load time, since the multitude of extra tags could be done away with.
Since I have time on my hands, I rewrote my LJ page using more modern HTML. Considering I spent 15 minutes on it, it's a pretty close facsimile. (Here's my version and a copy of the LJ page.) Total savings of doing things my way is about half a kilobyte. But I only have three entries, and most of the tag pollution is in the entries. But let's be conservative and say each page would be 1KB smaller. Multiply that by the (thousands? millions?) of page views per day, and the bandwidth savings would be megabytes or gigabytes per day. That'd go a long way towards making the site faster.
What do you think the odds are of that happening any time soon? Yeah, me too.
