Allied Warships
Check out our new extensive section on all the Allied Warships during WWII in all theatres of the war.Over 21,000 ships
uboat.net in 2003
XHTML/CSS rewrite
In October 2003 a new template was installed on the entire site, replacing the older look. This was a major operation requiring something like 50-60 hours of work to accomplish (probably lot more).Why?
The site has over 700 template files, each needed its own support files and so on. The complexity of this was getting too much.
- The site is much simpler to maintain
- Faster for you to load
- Higher content-ratio (less "junk" you download with the material you wish to see).
- Look and feel seperated from code. I can change look in minutes system-wide.
- Lower requirements on the server.
Development
This project was all about putting the entire site into XHTML and CSS layout. That meant first designing the layout and color schemes and then applying them while cleaning up the previous code to make it compliant with XHTML. The latter phase took much longer than the former and while it will never be really complete it's really well underway and the code is much simpler to read (both for the human and the browser).
All browsers should be capable of reading the material, although in older ones it will look wildly different, but again, still useable.
The site had to be fast, removing extra images that did nothing for the site itself. Code had to be clean (XHTML) and fast.
Some development facts- Removed 762 <table> tags (in favor of CSS) (1900 remain). They are nowhere used for layout purposes anymore, just for tabular data as they should.
- Removed 2700 <font> tags (in favor of CSS) (1200 remain).
- Removed 237kb of code from almost 1900 files
- Total size of XHTML + PHP + CSS code is 8mb in about 1900 files.
Credits
Such a development is rarely a solo job. The graphics were devised by my associate and friend Gunnar ?. Viglundsson (site) from Hugvit and myself.
The wonderful U-486 boat image at the top was generously provided by Mr. Morten Kutschera from the Norwegian company Arkikon (site). Gunnar and me then placed the image as we felt was best with the design.
- Gudmundur Helgason, Hafnarfjordur, Iceland - Nov 1, 2003