Blog

I was reading an article today about ESPN’s move to standards compliant code, using CSS and ditching tables (except where relevant). A couple of nuggets I wanted to share:1. They were able to trim an average of 50kb from each page, and with 40 million page views a day, that comes to 2 terabytes/day of bandwidth savings! I have heard a lot of people say that you shouldn’t waste your time trimming small amounts like that. I think ESPN has shown that it’s important. And it’s even better if you just code that way from the beginning so you don’t have to re-factor.2. They are blocking ‘upgradophobic’ users. I love that term, this article is the first I’ve seen it. These are people that don’t want to upgrade because “It works, why fix it?” ESPN has about 2% of their user-base that uses old non-standards compliant browsers, and they decided to block those people by forwarding them to a upgrade page. Good for them!3. “This is not a hospital, we are not doctors here…people aren’t dying. The worst thing that is going to happen is that people won’t get their sports.” I love that mentality. There are some sites out there that could be considered life saving, but in general people need to take a chill pill. If your site’s down for a few minutes, just relax and fix it.4. As they coded, they tested with IE, Netscape and Mozilla. Later they tested on Opera and Safari, and guess what? It all looked exactly as they wanted it. This is why standards are so important!I really like this designer, his name is Mike Davidson, and he’s ESPN’s Associate Art Director (funny title for a guy involved with web design). I really have a lot of opinions in common with him, and I enjoyed reading this article.