Freepages-Help-L Archives

Archiver > Freepages-Help > 2004-10 > 1096929262


From: Elsi <>
Subject: Re: [FreeHelp] Correction
Date: Mon, 04 Oct 2004 17:35:47 -0500
References: <000701c4a9b4$ecb7ea60$1edad1d8@heron>
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.2.20041003195354.00c45788@spamarrest.com>


At 08:29 PM 10/3/2004 -0400, Patricia Geary wrote:
>Jim,
>
>I'm not sure what is on your page, but I have a high speed cable
>connection and your page totally locks up Internet Explorer on my
>computer. I'm running windows xp with 256mb RAM.

The only problem I can see is the size of the page. This web page is 1.8 M
(yes, Meg) consisting of a table with seven columns and goodness knows how
many rows. Rule of thumb is that each web page should be no more than
50-70K, including all the elements.

Looking at the source, I can see one reason why the file is so large -- the
conversion tool has stuck a <.font face="Arial"> and <./font> tag into each
and every cell of the table. That's 26 extra characters in each cell time
7 cells per row or 182 extra characters per row. Font selections can be
set globally and then there's no need to specify it in each cell.

(Reminder -- on this list, we stick a period after the < in the HTML tags
to prevent some e-mail programs from attempting to execute the HTML instead
of simply displaying it as text.)

I have two suggestions:

1. Eliminate all of the <.font...> and <./font> tags in the document and
set the default font in a style tag in the <.head> section of the document.

This HTML fragment should be sufficient for your font specification:
<.style type="text/css">
BODY, P, TD { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif }
</style>

I did this as an experiment -- the resulting file was just over 1M, still
too big, but just a bit more than 1/2 the size of the file I started
with. You can load it from
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~elsi/heron.htm just to see that
it's the same information.

You could probably squeeze a bit more out of the file by eliminating
extraneous ALIGN=left attributes in some of the <.td> tags, but even
better use my suggestion #2:

2. Break your page down into multiple files. Here's an example of how I
did this with an index to a cemetery --
http://www.rootsweb.com/~alcalhou/harmony-cem-1.html

Referring to the rule of thumb above, you want to break this one big page
up into multiple pages, none of which is bigger than 70K. Since you don't
have a background or any images, that means you can have close to 50K of
real data (the other 10-20K will be your HTML tags) per page.

Kenny has suggested using letter ranges (A-D, E-G, etc.) Or you could put
a specific number of rows into each page (say 50 to 75) and then have an
index page which gives the first and last name on each of the resulting
pages. That's what I did on
http://www.rootsweb.com/~alcalhou/City-Cemetery.html for example.


Regards,
Elsi

>At 06:53 PM 10/3/2004 -0700, James Heron wrote:
>>Hello Everybody:
>>For those of you who have tried to reach my website and failed, the
>>correct URL address is:
>>
>>http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~heron1/index.htm

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