{"id":245,"date":"2004-09-16T18:53:20","date_gmt":"2004-09-16T22:53:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/make_money_fast_with_clean_markup"},"modified":"2004-09-16T18:53:20","modified_gmt":"2004-09-16T22:53:20","slug":"make_money_fast_with_clean_markup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2004\/09\/make_money_fast_with_clean_markup.html","title":{"rendered":"Make Money Fast with Clean Markup"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rakesh Pai: “The Economics of XHTML<\/a>” (via Anne Van Kesteren<\/a>). Anne advises that when you read Rakesh’s article, you sub in “semantic HTML” for “XHTML”. That’s a good substitution, although I actually prefer “clean markup.” Making your markup more semantic is a good thing, up to a point. Once you cross a certain line, your mind begins an inevitable slide into Semantic Extremism, until eventually you’ve convinced yourself that everything<\/em> should be a list item or some such nonsense.[1<\/a>]<\/sup> But I digress.<\/p>\n

There have been countless articles<\/a> like Rakesh’s about how XHTML<\/del> clean markup will save you big bucks. Honestly, I don’t fundamentally doubt the overall theory, but it disturbs me that none of these fine articles puts out hard numbers on how much money you’ll actually<\/em> save in practice. The most concrete examples in the genre so far are the “redesign articles”, wherein the author picks a large site with crufty markup, redesigns the home page with clean markup, and performs a highly naive calculation<\/strong> of the bandwidth saved. The best article that I know of is Mike Davidson’s interview with DevEdge<\/a>, and even that piece only provides a theoretical estimate.<\/p>\n

So let’s all put on our Business Analyst hats and ask a few questions that might be pertinent for designing an actual case study. To be sure, thinking in BizDev does not come naturally to most folks, certainly not me.[2<\/a>]<\/sup> So first, a short cleansing ritual, to prepare the mind for these alien thoughts:<\/p>\n

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Forbes R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! ROI! ROI! ROI! Aiiiiieeee!<\/em><\/p>\n

Ah, there we go. Now, consider a largish commercial site:<\/p>\n