CrossRef.org: One Fat Site
I’m currently doing some work that involves CrossRef, “a collaborative reference linking service that allows the user to click on a citation and be taken directly to the target content”. All well and good, except that CrossRef play fast and loose with the standard we all know as HTML(HyperText Markup Language).
Their site generates only 75 validation errors, which is by no means a lot. The worrying thing, though, is their use of made-up tags and attributes, like <csscriptdict>.
Potentially more damaging (not to mention costly) is the sheer size of the pages on the site. When you run the home page through the Web Page Analyzer, the size is reported as 416 KB, of which 290KB is images and 95KB is images JavaScript. CSS isn’t used (according to the report), though this could be because of the non-standard tags that are used.
I fancy giving this site a makeover, just to see what sort of savings could be made. I rather think that they will be huge. This is one Barry White of a site.