[WEB4LIB] Re: web publishing process

[sean dreilinger]

Mark Gooch wrote:
> wondering about.  What I am interested to know is are people concerned about
> the "bloated" files and less than clean HTML code produced by some of the
> HTML editors (Netscape Composer, Front Page, etc.) in this type of

a financial consideration applies here to sites that are billed by
transfer - if your library is the cool site of the day or it has some
incredibly popular attraction online, the time spent shrinking monster
html documents, at least on the site's main pages, may be well
warranted.

cascading style sheets can be used to further clean everything up, by
taking all the formatting markup out of every html document and putting
it into a little CSS file. i am testing some heavily accessed content
with this and find i can reduce the size of many documents by 20-30% by
stripping out the literal formatting and letting a style sheet do the
look and feel work for the whole site/subsite.

> situation.  I've been contemplating whether to have staff here create pages
> on their own with Composer or some other editor.  I'm concerned that the
> less than stellar code  which is created (and I don't consider myself an

the upside of almost all html editors is they enforce valid HTML/SGML
(or at least come pretty close :-). except for heavily trafficked
content, optimizing beyond what an editor does may not be worth anyone's
time, esp. yours!

> HTML "purist") will eventually fill our server with files which are larger
> than necessary.  Also, when people run into coding problems I will likely be

hope you'll be able to afford more storage when you need it :-).

HTH 
--sean :-)
                          sean dreilinger, mlis
                          mailto:sean at durak.org
                          http://durak.org/sean