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113 Comments
- UGM2099, on 10/12/2007, -1/+32Welcome to earth, yes people care about sports.
ESPN.com, according the the designer, is one of the most viewed sites in the world. ~40 Million page views per day. - ericab, on 10/12/2007, -1/+27Very impressive. Maybe this will encourage other sites to follow suit.
- thenikola, on 10/12/2007, -1/+22I really dont see the difference between someone "wasting their time" on digg going to sites about optomizing firefox so they can digg more useless stuff any bigger a waste of time than going to a sports site. Don't get me wrong I'm just as big of a geek as the next guy but they're no worse than us.
- wbrendel, on 10/12/2007, -2/+17I always wondered how significant the bandwidth savings with CSS were, and now I know. I'm very impressed! ++digg
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15Hmm. 40 million hits per day * 300kB (rounded to 1000) (unoptimized, tables everywhere layout) = 10.9139364 terabytes per day.
40 million hits * 200kB (rounded to 1000) (with CSS) = 7.27595761 terabytes per day.
Pretty open and shut case. - burke, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15It's super-easy. Once you start, you'll never go back.
- hrunting, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12ESPN made that switch in 2003. The article referenced is from June 10, 2003. Hell, the interviewer is Eric Meyer, from Netscape Communications! I'm not saying the ideas behind the article aren't great, but this isn't groundbreaking stuff anymore.
- lane.montgomery, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13HTML 2.0?
More like viva la CSS 2.0 - Surreal, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12html is at 4.01, I believe
- dkm201, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Yeah, why are people watching sports when they could be doing something IMPORTANT, like digging up non-stories about Apple, or writing little comments about how people who like sports are dumb? You are a tool and it makes baby Jesus cry whenever you make one of your pompous posts. Hunter S. Thompson would hate you
- PauliShore, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Hunter Thompson just saw your spelling of "highlights" and swallowed his cig when he rolled in his grave.
- digid, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Well if espn is so keen on bandwidth savings why did my http responses all come back uncompressed. They are not even using gzip compression to save on bandwidth!
espn.go.com which is serving up the html is not using gzip.
espn-att.starwave.com which is serving their css and js is not using gzip
If you have the choice of using gzip versus CSS go with gzip. You will save a lot more on bandwidth.
Of course if you want to save the most on bandwidth implement both.
Go go espn web team! - elroy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8the bandwidth saved from user complaint posts alone must be larger than the GDP of a small country
- twollamalove, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9I find this odd, because I still find their site to feel slow in comparison to si.com. Maybe it's just the full on visual/audio rape I receive at espn.com that deceives me.
Anyway, I wouldn't recommend anyone design their site with espn.com as the model. - DetroitTigers, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Uhm - yes?
Sports are a huge part of almost every culture. - oliyoung, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Um, this is like 3 years old .. but, nonetheless, it's considered one of the most influential documents in the whole CSS movement
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8"html is at 4.01, I believe"
There is a working draft for HTML5, as well (thanks Google).
(Note: XHTML is NOT HTML5. XHTML is a seperate entity, and is only roughly compatible with HTML, and this will change as the two technologies diverge. There is also an XHTML2 in draft form). - uptown, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9> 87% of typical web users have screens resolutions above 800px wide ... and those that don't won't be spending any money on your site anyway...
- dbpigeon, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Now I wonder how much Slashdot saved when they switched to CSS.
- davdav, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Tables are great for tabular data. Other than that, avoid.
- Nanobe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6The so-called "HTML 5" is not an official version from the World Wide Web Consortium. It's developed by the independent Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), and has a lot of things seriously wrong about it if you ask me. I wouldn't mind some of these features being implemented under a separate XML namespace, but the way they're attempting to just glop it on top of the current HTML 4.01 and XHTML just feels like the bad old days when browser developers didn't think before adding support for junk they thought was a good idea at the time.
Anyway, they have been trying to get the W3C to recognize it, and the W3C has begun writing drafts for a couple things like XMLHttpRequest, but the hesitance is quite clear and I believe well-founded.
Regarding XHTML, you really shouldn't use it at this time. Internet Explorer doesn't support it properly (it only displays it as a webpage when you use the wrong content type, and IE treats it just like regular HTML), and there are vast differences between how browsers display it under these conditions and how a true XHTML browser would display it. Check this out: http://www.webdevout.net/articles/beware_of_xhtml.php - uptown, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Anyone got a good reference book or site for CSS? I'd perfer a book (like to hold things every once in awhile) but a site'll do as well.
- sfacets, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Very nicely done! Welcome to modern times Disney! (the owners of espn btw)
- hater2win, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9This was a great read. Like some peope have said, it is old, but it really gives you a look into how the big boys do it there are some great tips in there. Great digg!
- Ionik, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5untrue - there are lots out there who are both geeks and jocks
- MrDiaz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5no wonder where they get those terabytes of bandwith usage per month. They are the 24th site with more traffic on the internet. Good thing they are now using css, and pretty good design too. Painless and clean interface.
- Wamzlee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Yes, many care about sports, amazingly, sports is treated much much more seriously than politics, which is pretty sad, but I guess thats just my opinion.
- debian_, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5"and those that don't won't be spending any money on your site anyway"
What a horrible business shooting yourself in the foot is.
If you have the freedom to decide width dimensions for the site you are hired to design, is it really that hard to stay within 800 pixels? When you consider factors such as the number of letters/words per line of text block for optimum reading, not overwhelming viewers with excessive, condensed content, it makes going over 800 but staying below 1024 a hassle. Some designs will benefit by ignoring the 13%, but for the most part, you should be designing your site for the content, not the other way around.
If people are gonna have wide sites, try and make them fluid or something. Remember 800x600 and 1024x768 is a screen resolution, and not everyone browses with their browser maximized. - GrinningFool, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4digid - gzip adds noticeable CPU overhead. When you support this kind of traffic, it would be enough to merit a (rough guess here) 25% increase in the number of servers you have to maintain. From that perspective, it is probably less expensive to pay for the bandwidth than to pay for the increased maintenance costs -- especially because ESPN is not really in the business of technology.
- lightdifference, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4It mentions firefox nowhere and classifies safari as a beta, heh. This is old news. 2003 anyone?
- MonkeyBoy87, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3this raises an interesting question. what kind of cost savings does this ceate 730 TB is not a small amount of bandwidth to pay for, even if you are ESPN. I also wonder what other sites at the front end of the long tail would benefit by doing this.
- peterthegreat4, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5i'm a designer and i read a lot about trends and accessibility. I hear a lot about not making a design wider than 600-700 pixels. however, almost all of the most popular sites (msn, yahoo, espn, cnn) have designs that push or are wider than 800 pixles. i think that i'm going to focus less on this issue of compatibility.
- m85476585, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4This is a great book: Stylin' with CSS : A Designer's Guide (Paperback)
by Charles Wyke-Smith
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321305256/sr=8-3/qid=1144637761/103-8984601-3008661
And I use this for reference:
http://www.w3schools.com/css/ - NeilM, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This was true "before" the digg effect. ;-)
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5CSS is a way of alleviating the stress put on a server by describing how the description language (aka markup) should be processed (a "Meta-Meta Language", if you please).
Since CSS doesn't have to be embedded, it is capable of being external to the markup data itself, and can be modified by the document object model directly.
No, Stylesheets are not supposed to replace Markup. Stylesheets are supposed to make Markup easier to work with, by giving users the freedom of arbitrarily changing the Style, without having to change the markup.
And yes, CSS often can be used in place of tables with "Div Magic", as CSS has full ability to do positioning and alignment of objects. Just don't expect it to work in the most common browser on the Internet (Internet Explorer). - mrWoot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Side note: First radio event: Sports. First televised event: Baseball Game.
Like people have said, sports are a huge part of every culture. It brings people together. - ateam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I must have saved at least megabytes in my outgoing bandwidth after implementing CSS on my site ;-)
Heh, but no joke, CSS rocks. - andr3, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4 digg for digging up the article... thanks.
This was hugely commented upon inside the webdev community/blogs, but it's good to spread the word. The more people know the advantages of CSS, the better. If someone reads this and starts reading more stuff on webstandards, it proves the point of this digg.
Also, relating to the above comment, my opinion is that you should try to validate your CSS, but it's not a vital necessity. If you need to break the validity of your css to achieve cross browser compatiblity, why not? Noone but the hardcore-standardistas will validate your css besides you. In the end, all that matters is that your website shows up as similar as possible in most recent/used browsers.
check out http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp A good place to start. - vertino, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Most of those W3C validation errors are fixable, they just need to get some junior dev to work on it for a few days.
I'm just impressed that a major corporate website is taking accessibility more seriously now! - sxtxixtxcxh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2shameless 'self' promotion: http://lib.rario.us/media/tag/css?sort=rating
those are books on lib.rario.us tagged with 'css' sorted by rating :P - degei, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Very nice case for structured design
digg++ - mikeindustries, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Thanks for the digg, sdm011. Although this digg is sending a good amount of traffic to my site, I must say that I'm pretty shocked that a three-year old interview is getting this much love. It's been reblogged like 50 times today on other people's sites, and people are talking about it like the redesign just happened. Anyway, it's all good I guess. The info is still relevant.
The other interesting thing to me is that almost everyone seems to concentrate on one aspect of the interview: the bandwidth savings. Interestingly, Eric asked the bandwidth question as a total afterthought. A week after the interview was conducted, he ran some numbers and inserted that info. Good call I guess... - Arramol, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Fact: Different people have different interests. What you do and don't care about is not necessarily indicative of the rest of the culture.
- mikeazorin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'm sure they could cut another terabyte by switching to textonly ads.
- knightblade2oo4, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Yeah try to get their CSS to validate.
Good luck, XD. - chrisfarber, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@m85476585:
If you're a serious web developer, you should know. It's poor practice to not even know your own HTML/CSS.
Also, maybe I'm crazy, but I would imagine Dreamweaver would have a GUI for creating CSS? I believe the best way to code a website is still direct coding, even if you facilitate yourself with tools such as Dreamweaver. You can't expect them to manage everything for you, however, or you'll end up with a mess. - m85476585, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Since I switched to CSS I *write* probably 10x more code. With tables I let Dreamweaver do the work, but with CSS I do it manually. I dont know if I have any less total code.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If you're a visual learner like me you should pick up "DHTML and CSS for the world wide web." It's a good introduction to CSS for people who have experience with HTML.
- Skeuomorph, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2(got cut off)
How does this compare to Digg? Digg's HTML is <30K, 62K of CSS, 9.5K of images, and 117K of JavaScripts. The images and news change, but the CSS and JS cache. Initial page weight is ~200K, but after that under 40KB. This is what CSS is supposed to be for.
(Was cut off by the HTML filter on less than sign.) -
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