Noel D. Jackson and I have been working this week on a standards-compliant redesign of Fleshbot. Here is rather a lot of information on the process and its benefits. MONEY FIRST This pitch will recommend that Nick Denton hire Noel to reformulate all the Dentonist sites in valid HTML and CSS. I'm not pitching any kind of paid service. ISSUE Fleshbot, Gawker, and Gizmodo use outdated and incorrect coding methods-- that is, invalid HTML and (of lesser importance) table-based layouts. "Invalid HTML" means the underlying code is grammatically incorrect. Browsers have to work to figure out what you really meant. Valid HTML means all the is and js are dotted and the ts are crossed. The current sites don't validate. The only halfway decent article on validation: . I had a fun IM session on the topic: . Table-based layouts are unnecessarily large and complex and have been obviated by the use of CSS (cascading stylesheets-- auxiliary pages with formatting instructions). NOT A HATE-ON FOR CONTENT None of this says anything about the content of the sites, all of which I love or I wouldn't be doing this. We're looking under the hood here. AND THIS MATTERS HOW? Existing sites are much larger than they have to be. Some typical size reductions in standards-compliant redesigns are 40% to 85%. All that extra code is costing you money in bandwidth. Browsers have a hard time "rendering" or displaying the pages. You won't really notice that for the simple reason that browser makers have engineered tremendously complex hacks into their products to make broken sites display properly. However, validated pages render faster in most cases. The sites are harder to update. Tag-soup markup is too difficult to manipulate. The sites are harder to reuse. A standards-compliant design can serve a single HTML file to all devices-- browsers, handhelds, the lot. And later on, if you want to issue a CD or a book of site contents or do something as yet unimagined, with validated markup you actually can, at least with XHTML coding. The sites aren't accessible. None of the existing sites meets any of the three levels of accessibility articulated in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG, ). The Web is all about universality. The existing sites aren't universal. The coding is outdated. It's 1995-era HTML. Web development has improved since then. OLD COMPATIBILITY ISSUES Back in the day, due to improper coding, there were problems rendering the sites (Gawker especially) in Netscape 4 and IE 5 on Macintosh. HOW TO FIX IT Purely on a lark, entirely on spec, and wholly as a volunteer project, on my prompting, my pal Noel D. Jackson-- -- recoded Fleshbot in valid HTML. That took less than an hour. Then he worked on improving the CSS. The current beta redesign (just the homepage) can be improved slightly, but the code validates and it works fine in every browser we've tested, including Netscape 4.8 and IE 5 on Mac. Nobody at Conde Nast is gonna be stuck looking at a blank screen. The page size reduced from 38K to 28K, a 26% saving. That is not a vapourware number: It means a direct saving of 26% less bandwidth. (The actual saving will be higher because the CSS file only has to be used once per site visit, if that often. The old method of burying formatting within the HTML means formatting was re-loaded with each successive page.) BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY; PROGRESSIVE ENHANCEMENT We made the choice to serve Netscape 4.8 a largely-unstyled page. Lee Jeans did the same thing. That is the correct choice because Netscape 4 is ancient and has the worst standards compliance of any browser in the history of the Internet. You cannot make a site look good in modern browsers (Version 5 and later, plus Safari, Mozilla, and the like) and also look good in Netscape 4. Moreover, different decimal releases of Netscape 4-- .6, .78, .8-- have different incompatibilities. The original Fleshbot wouldn't even load in Netscape 4.8. This redesign brings compatibility to that browser for the first time. This approach of maintaining compatibility for old devices while maximizing sophistication and appearance for newer devices is known as progressive enhancement. WHY DOES THIS MATTER? One more time: Standards-compliant designs are correct, modern, accessible, and as close to universally compatible as you're gonna get, and they save you money purely on bandwidth alone. FURTHER IMPROVEMENTS Noel had a lot of trouble tweaking the CSS to make the nouvelle formulation Fleshbot look nearly identical to the old one. A redesign from scratch, which might not require significant changes in graphic design, would fix that problem and reduce file size even more. BRAGGING RIGHTS I am doing this because I want all sites to be standards-compliant and, most of all, accessible. (You get accessibility nearly for free as a result of standards compliance.) I also like the indie Web sites, having run a few myself. But the Dentonist sites should also embrace standards compliance as a point of pride. Not only do you put out unique "niche" sites, two of which have a reported million page views a month and one of which deals with porn, but the sites could be fully up to date and comply with every standard imaginable. The sites would truly be native to the Web-- actual Web content delivered correctly to any visitor. AUTHORING There is the problem that site authors (Choire, Jonno, Pete) will need better tools to create "content." But it's easy to fix. I talked to Anil Dash of Six Apart, and the combination of a few Movable Type plug-ins and a bit of training will probably make it no harder to produce valid content than the old stuff. In fact, it will probably be easier because the rules are much simpler. (First of all, there are rules.) Naturally, Noel and I can do the training and Noel can work with Nick Aster to install everything. You could also use Kung-Log as a front end to Movable Type. NEXT STEPS Hire Noel Jackson to redesign all the Dentonist sites in valid HTML and CSS. This will involve server-side changes to mod_rewrite to clean up URLs without breaking any of the existing URLs. Install the necessary plug-ins and the like to make the authoring task easier. Do a wee bit of education with the site authors, which Noel and I will help with. Promote the hell out of the redesigns. A single mention on will have every standardista on the Web aware of your sites within 24 hours if they aren't already. Yes, Noel costs money. Why shouldn't he? No, we didn't do this as a Trojan horse to extract a commission. We did do it on a lark, but it works so well that it's worth paying Noel to do the same across the board. This is purely my suggestion, but Noel tells me he's OK with it. Whatever you pay Noel (I don't know how much-- that's his business-- but he tells me he's reasonable) you will get back in a short number of months in bandwidth savings alone. Let's assume the Fleshbot size reductions are representative. Would you like to reduce your Gawker and Gizmodo bandwidth bills by 26% each? I'll continue to provide all reasonable free consultation and will pimp the redesigns widely myself.