TMG-L Archives

Archiver > TMG > 2005-01 > 1106872800


From: "John Cardinal" <>
Subject: RE: Second Site stuff (WAS no subject: Re: [TMG]
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 19:40:04 -0500
In-Reply-To: <6.2.0.14.2.20050126230905.0494bab0@popd.ix.netcom.com>


Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> I broke down and bought it last week... Mainly because I wanted to
> update my old UFT generated web site -- since the data sets were
> getting out of synch.
>
> I still miss the UFT "family journal" type of report, and haven't
> managed to produce, even in print form, the "correct" equivalent from
> TMG. And SS appears to mainly do lists of "individual narratives".
>
> My biggest surprise was that, for something that supposedly had
> fewer individuals (I'd cleaned OUT some of the strays from the UFT
> data), SS produced a much bigger set of files -- even with citations
> turned off, the SS version of the site runs nearly 2MB larger. I'd
> actually reached my 10MB limit on the first run. Had to delete the
> nice charts (which were new, not part of the UFT set), a few
> unrelated image files, and the citations to get the disk usage down
> to a range with some spare space...

Dennis,

One early goal of SS was to make pages that were as efficient as possible,
HTML-wise. Over time, users have asked for more features, both in terms of
data inclusion and data format. In addition, web hosts have expanded disk
space allocations since the first beta versions of SS. As a result, I
haven't really concentrated on HTML efficiency although I certainly try to
be as efficient as possible.

One way to make SS pages more efficient would be to write a custom Format
that sacrifices presentation in exchange for small pages. Writing a custom
Format for SS means learning a little about XML and XSL, but it's not too
difficult. As I have gleaned from your TMG-L posts, you are pretty technical
and I am sure you could handle it.

Two of the SS formats that are provided with the program and are built on
XML/XSL are "Bullets" and "Indented". I think those use more sparse HTML
than "Two Column" or "Three Column". If you haven't done so yet, I suggest
you experiment with a couple formats and see if you find a good balance
between format and file size.

John


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