One of the functions of my job is to maintain in intranet website, this site has grown over the two years it has been operational, and no is over 400 HTML pages and 11GBytes of downloads. Over that time it become completely unmaintainable.
When it was originally written, the company PC's were still using Netscape 4 as the primary browser, with IE5.0 installed for the few departments that needed it. Now, IE 5.5 is the main browser - NN 4 is still installed for backwards compatability - and I have been allocated some time to re-design the website, so a XHTML/CSS solution was in order.
I have created a template page, seleted a colour scheme that is easy on the high but still with high contrast, and completely based on 'em's. My own PC has Firefox and IE6 installed, and the pages displayed fine, the HTML and CSS both passed the W3C validation with flying colours.
I then asked another staff member to have a look at the new layout... None of the buttons appeared where they should. Seems IE6 is better at standards than IE5.5!! Eventaully after several hours of 'mucking about' I managed to get a combination of Margin, Padding, and width that all three browsers would load!! Even then, IE5.5 does not allow you to change the cursor over objects!
The difference in disk space taken is amazing, 18 pages from the new site (no downloads attached yet) came to 36KBytes, the old main menu page was 25KBytes ON IT'S OWN! Best of all, it's all written in Notepad... I do load it into Dreamweaver occasionally to check out some of the more obscure CSS synax, and to ease the 'Cut and Paste' of template code between pages, but there is absolutely NO BLOAT in this design. It's not just snobbery, many of the engineer's accessing this site do so over a 56K modem so every few K matters.
And finally, it's a perfectly usuable site on an 800*600 screen, the old site was OK with 1024*768 but liked bigger!
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