[Gardeners] Common Lisp Directory, HTTP activity

[Marc Battyani]

"David Trudgett" <wpower at zeta.org.au> wrote:
>
> I've been noticing ongoing HTTP activity between my computer's
> external network interface and your server whenever connected to
> CLD. This consumes bandwidth and is unusual and worrying (for obvious
> reasons), and I believe it shouldn't be happening. Is there a way to
> modify your site to stop it from happening? Does it serve any useful
> purpose?

It's a FAQ. ;-) I should make an entry for this in the CLD FAQ.
Here is the short explanation:
It's because of my Ajax like style Framework. I maintain a bi-directional 
communication with the server which is polled every 2 or 3 seconds. Normally 
this should not be visible for the user. This Framework was intended for 
complex collaborative intranet web applications on high speed networks so 
it's overkill for the CLD. I will work on this in the future like I did for 
the user friendly URI.

> The HTML generated is 4.0 transitional, using tables for layout. It
> doesn't really matter, but would XHTML and CSS for layout be better?
> What percentage of the site's users would experience degraded layout
> or formatting? Very few, I'd imagine.

Yes. Pierre-François Gomez made a much better version of the HTML but it 
need to be tested to be sure that it works with the major browsers before I 
can switch to it and it's out of sync now.

> The JavaScript generated is obfuscated (e.g. names like function
> f876454). Is there a reason for that? And can it be (easily) fixed?

No real reason, it was automatically generated a long time ago so it was 
some kind of gensym IIRC.

> Would it be better to not use JavaScript at all? (That would be my
> preference, but then you would have to eschew those fancy expanding
> and collapsing thingies.)

Well, nowdays javascript is rather well accepted I think. And for now I need 
it for the bi-directional stuff.

Marc