CSS and XHTML

Hello all!

I saw a post on pgsql-hackers from Robert Treat that made me interested
in finding out if there's something for me to do with the
postgresql.org site. It sounds like there are a lot of things going on:
merging of sites, adding or increasing the multilingual capabilities,
and reworking the backend.

I don't know specifics of what needs to be done and I'm willing to work
on anything I'm capable of doing. One thing I am interested in doing is
working to make the site as efficient and standards-compliant as
possible. In particular, I'd like to see the feasibility of coding to
the XHTML standard and moving as much presentational code to CSS as
possible.

For the most part, this is pretty straightforward and not too
difficult. I downloaded the site from the CVS and reworked
cache/index.htm, postgresql.css, and page.php. I rewrote them to XHTML
1.0 Strict and got them free of errors (using BBEdit's Check Syntax
function) with presentation that closely matches the original. (One
caveat: I haven't been able to connect to the database(s)—is there a
way to do this from my development machine?—so the generated pages
haven't included the main content. The markup generated by the
basic.*.php scripts is all error-free.) I don't foresee any major
problems in the rest of the site, though I have to get to know the code
better to be sure.

I see at least two advantages for the site: (a) the resulting scripts
are easier to read, as there is very little presentational markup
remaining, and therefore much easier to maintain; and (b) the server
load is substantially decreased, as less code needs to be sent to the
client. The presention (in the css file) is cached by the clients, so
it rarely needs to be fetched. The pages themselves are slimmed down,
since they contain just the document structure. For example, the
current main index page is 15.2K + .6K (postgresql.css) for a total of
15.8K. The main index page is now 6.3K (sans news remember), and
postgresql.css is 3.8K, for a total of 10.1K. I know we're only talking
5K, but it's a 30% reduction in server load for the *first* page view.
Once the CSS is cached, we're looking at a 40% reduction per page.

Of course these will change once the content. Just a rough estimate for
the content section: 13.6K to 11.3K, so just a little savings there
(about 15%).

Anyway, you guys probably know all this anyway. And I'm sure there are
more critical issues to work on. But this is one thing I know I could
work on and you can probably tell I'm kind of excited to. If you have
any questions or would like to see the modifications, just ask. One
thing I'd like to know is server stats (load and browser distributions,
if it's available). And if I can help out in other ways, I'm happy to
do that as well.

Regards,

Michael Glaesemann
grzm myrealbox com