The ASP.NET Code Behind Whitehouse.gov

An anonymous reader writes "The author looks at the markup for the new whitehouse.gov site, launched today. It uses ASP.NET and various JavaScript libraries. It suffers from various inefficiencies, most easily remedied. Check the images and techniques used to build the site front-end."

Comments

Maybe we can

[AKAImBatman]

The whitespace.gov site has lots of whitespace characters.

Hmm... Freudian slip? FWIW, most of the whitespace is probably generated by the ASP technology they used. Spots where code goes can often generate unexpected whitespace. It's just a side effect of using scriptlet-type technologies.

Don't get me started on the "correct" way to write ASP. The tag-substitution gobbldy-gook encourages all kinds of bad page-development practices. The request-time attributes + templating taglibs seen in JSP provide a much cleaner separation between logic and HTML.

The whitehouse.gov site uses more GIFs than PNGs.

Ouch. Welcome back to 1996. Web developers looking for the smallest file size really need to learn that there is such a thing as palletized PNGs. They're even smaller than GIFs, even.

The whitehouse.gov site uses heavy JPG compression.

This is one place where my reaction is "BFD". As long as it looks acceptable under most circumstances, the people with the carefully color calibrated monitors (*cough*yeslikeme*cough*) can suffer a bit. Heck, half the JPGs on the internet look like garbage, so I'm not too worried about artifacting in the gradients.

The whitehouse.gov site uses IIS 6.0. The whitehouse.gov site uses ASP.NET 2.0.

Can we choose the right technologies for a website? No we can't! Thankfully, the President isn't hired to choose the best technology to run his website. ;-)

This page is a way

[Nimey]

for the author to show his superiority to the Internet. None of what he cites really matters.

Helpful advice??

[biocute]

Many developers use the JQuery from Google's servers for improved performance and lower latency.

Is this guy serious? Advising Whitehouse.gov to use a remote server to serve javascripts?

Re:Helpful advice??

[c_g_hills]

Who said anything about hacking? It's entirely feasible that they would change the script they serve up themselves. It would allow Google to track all visitors to the site who have javascript enabled, a possible privacy violation.

well at least it's not...

[Cyko_01]

...flash based!

Engineering nerds, this is an example!

[Anonymous Coward]

You will encounter this sometimes in your life, and you better get used to it. Sometimes, believe it or not, things are done simply because they need to be done.

They don't spend a lot of time laboring over every little detail, they have a list of tasks and a deadline and they do their best to meet the deadline.

They anticipate that nerds who nitpick Battlestar Galactica episode continuity errors will likely come in and stroke their butter soaked neck beards and chortle about how this or that could be done better to achieve 5% faster page loads, or allow for translation into Swahili.

But, they get paid either way and in the grand scheme of things trying to impress anyone on Slashdot is probably pretty low on anyone's to-do list.

As someone who's argued with people about vi vs. emacs in the past, I can honestly say you guys have reached a new low both in wasting time, having no worthwhile point, and being worthless slashdot editors. The trifecta.

Re:The fact that he uses them makes them the best.

[MindStalker]

Technically its the same server and software that was on whitehouse.gov yesterday under the Bush Administration. Like the Defense Secretary, keeping the stuff that works and would be a hassle to change around for right now.