Friday, September 11, 2009

When it comes to HTML, thin is in!

On occasion, customers come to us with an existing website on the Domino content management system. For that matter, when they come to us with existing content on some other system and we must migrate it. Part of our job is stripping out extraneous HTML.

When customers are reviewing Struturo versus other content management systems, especially those and Domino, we tell people to read our source code from the browser. Any styling tags should be put into the stylesheet. They should never be in the HTML itself.

Just today, we were working on a page and copying the table from the existing Domino content management system source code into Struturo. It had in-line fonts defined, table alignment specs, spam tags with in-line styles etc. We stripped all of that out to just bare-bones tables and cut the HTML at least in half.

It's not just bandwidth savings that's important. It's the fact that in-line styles are used in spite of the stylesheet. So if a customer changes their styles down the road they end up having to edit the HTML content instead of the simple task of editing the stylesheet itself.

When it comes to HTML and Struturo output, thin is in!