Netscape's DevEdge has an interesting Interview With Mike Davidson of ESPN. They recently switched to a standards-compliant CSS-based layout. To quote:
ESPN.com, the online sister of the ESPN cable networks, serves up more than half a billion page views every month, so when the home page of the site dropped all layout tables in favor of structural markup and CSS-driven layout, the Web design community took notice. To add to the intrigue, the site's design is (as of this writing) being adjusted over time, so that the site is in effect making the latter stages of its redesign process public. For a personal site to do such a thing is rare enough; for a major commercial site to do it would have been almost unimaginable.
When you get half a billion hits a month, the bandwidth numbers tend to add up. By moving to a CSS layout, they cut 50 KB out of each page. Over a month, that's 61 terabytes. That's a big number.
Posted by Karl
March 25, 2003 04:39 PM