Moving and Shaping

Apparently I’m a desirable emigrant.  In response to yesterday’s comment-in-passing that Kat and I had been kicking around the idea of moving to another country, I’ve had three people write encouraging me to emigrate to Canada, and one other person recommend the United Kingdom.  The Canada people actually make a pretty good case, since apparently there’s a plan afoot for Canada to make the Turks and Caicos Islands their eleventh province.  That sounds pretty sweet, even if I would have to spend the whole year encased in zinc oxide.

Personally, I’ve always liked Toronto as a city.  Their weather isn’t significantly different than what we experience here in Cleveland, plus I know a number of very cool folks who already live there.  I can’t comment on places in the UK, since I’ve never actually been there (although I hope to fix that within the next year or so).  For the record, the country we had in mind was Norway.  I also gave some thought to the Bahamas, but then we’re back to the prospect of me resembling a lobster on a semi-continual basis.

There’ve been a whole lot of XHTML-and-CSS redesigns announced in the past ten days, and I’ve been remiss in pointing them out.  Here’s a list of the ones I noticed: The Open Championship, Quark, Message Digital Design Ltd., Phish.com, Lawrence, Kansas Weather, Adaptive Path, and Inc.com.  There were some others, I think, but the URLs seem to have escaped me.

On that last one, Dan talks a bit about the particulars of the Inc. redesign, and Doug points out that the markup size reduction for Inc.com’s redesign was just about the same as that for the redesigns of Adaptive Path and Wired News.  I’ll add that it’s very close to the markup size reduction seen when ESPN.com redesigned.  So yes, Doug’s absolutely right: there’s a trend here.  Old-school table-and-spacer designs can be visually recreated using lean, structural markup and CSS, and the process cuts page size by about half.  Some sites will see less savings, but some will see more.  As an example, my off-the-cuff guess (having peeked at the source of a typical page) is that eBay could drop its page weight by 66% or so.  They could probably reduce their annual outgoing bandwidth by several petabytes.  Tell you what, eBay: I’ll show you how to do it and do it right, and you can pay me five percent of your savings over the next five years.  Deal?

• Moving and Shaping was published on Friday, July 18th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Personal categories.
• There have been no replies.