San Francisco Examiner goes with standards

"Goodbye spacer gifs <sniff>"

[photon]

The San Francisco Examiner has converted to fully valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS code.

The webmaster talks about the change here [digital-web.com].

This is what a basic link in our navigation looked like late last year, before standards:

<tr>
<td class="navmenu" height="18" onClick="javascript:rolloutNav(this);document.location='/home/index.cfm'" onMouseOver="javascript:rolloverNav(this);" onMouseOut="javascript:rolloutNav(this); " colspan="2"><a href="/home/index.cfm" class="nav">HOME</a></td> </tr>
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#EEEEEE" class="navmenuspacer" colspan="2"><img src="../site_images/spacer.gif" width="1" height="2"></td> </tr>

Now take a look at what an Examiner navigation link looks like now:

<li><a href="/home/">Home</a></li>

[DrDoc]

Neato! Good article

[photon]

There's some great information in there for anyone who's trying to make the case for switching to standards. He mentions that in March spacer GIFs alone accounted for over 90Mb of bandwidth!

Another quote:

As a result [of the switch to standards], even though our traffic was about 40% higher in July 2004 than in September 2003, our bandwidth was almost exactly the same for those two months.

[choster]

It's even more impressive when you realize nobody reads the Examiner ;) -- I actually know people in SF who subscribe to the Merc instead.

[kerro]

Appreciate the link thanks photon.... good to read from webmasters about their builds - especially the builds that involve moving to web standards.

I'm surpised about the spacer gif numbers for their old site. 0.3% of their monthly transfer? How? You'd think that they'd be using just one global spacer gif - once it downloads to the user's local cache then it stays there for all other uses across the site. Let's say a user visits the front page only which might be 150k total page weight. a 50 byte spacer gif is only 0.03% of that... and we're not even accounting for the user going to other pages and downloading more things that would reduce that % even further. Anyway, I guess it doesn't matter, but the details are important!

And is it just me (probably) or is this new examiner site quite... er, boring? I mean every section looks like every other section. The news section looks like business which looks like cooking which looks like sport which looks like features. Maybe they wanted that... or maybe this is the result of CSS gobal styles infecting everything for the sake of consistent, maintainable, light-weight.... repetitive layout?

I'm sure web standards can cater for diversity in news media site design. Just I haven't seen it yet.