[thelist] Cutting the fat from a page...help!

[Judah McAuley]

At 01:42 PM 8/9/2001 -0700, John wrote:
> > http://www.proposalkit.com/info.htm
>
>There aren't all that many scripts on the page... it's setting a cookie and
>preloading all the images, that's where the bulk is.
>
>Have you considered stripping out those empty DIVs, though? That could
>help. If the HTML was still too large then unnesting those tables, removing
>some of the non-vital attributes, checking for nested FONT tags or bold
>images, these could be some ways of trimming down the markup.
>
>jd

I certainly agree with this.  Take a look at the following from the page:

<tr>
     <td colspan="3">
       <div align="center"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" 
size="2"><b><img src="img/screen3.gif" width="150" height="120" 
align="left" hspace="0" vspace="0"></b></font>
         <div align="left"><br>
         </div>
         <div align="left">
           <p align="center"><font size="4" face="Arial, Helvetica, 
sans-serif"><b>Professional
             Proposal Kit 3.5</b></font><font size="2" face="Arial, 
Helvetica, sans-serif"><br>
             <i>Supports Win98/NT/ME/2000 &amp; Mac. <br>
             All tools easy to customize.</i></font></p>
         </div>
       </div>
     </td>
   </tr>

There is a font and a bold tag surrounding an image and a div tag 
surrounding a line break.  There is also a paragraph aligned center within 
a div aligned left within a div aligned center.  Unnecessary code all over 
the place.  I think that you're going to have to go through and start 
sorting out your tables and div's and recode by hand.  None of this code 
(as far as I can tell) is completely *incorrect* (although the bold image 
comes close), but it is bulky and confusing.  That is one of the downside 
to using a WYSIWYG editor.

Also, I noticed that you have a lot of repetition in your font tags.  This 
snippet, for example, has two instances of <font size="2" face="Arial, 
Helvetica, sans-serif">.  You could move all of your font tags into a style 
sheet declare them as classes and then use the classes in your code.  This 
should cut out quite a bit of bulk in your code and improve readability to 
boot.

Judah