'Graphics-lite' version of site

The RISC OS open site, as it stands, is a pain for many reasons [coughTextilecough], but the most common and practical one is that it is extremely slow to load on NetSurf.

This is due to the copious translucent graphics in the banner, which NetSurf agonizes over calculating, single-tasking and making the bits of the site which are actually useful unusable while the pretty bits load, get resized, then get resized again.

And it all happens again every time you go to a new page. This goes quadruply for pages accessed over HTTPS, which is very slow in the first place. And then doubly again for trying to use it on a StrongARM RiscPC as opposed to an Iyonix.

So, please, can someone spend ten minutes or so on an alternative stylesheet with as much plain text as possible? It shouldn’t be that difficult – simply remove all the images, down to that graduated border around the edge. I don’t see why the login and account button has to be an image, either, when everything else on that toolbar isn’t.

It’s not the stylesheet, it’s tables. The site uses lots of tables for layout, so that old RISC OS browsers like Browse and Fresco display something sane. These make NetSurf go slowly, particularly when nested – the forum uses them heavily.

I’m working on a site revision due to go live soon-ish. It has transpired that updating various Rails components in turn required an upgrade of Ruby which in turn required a special version building which in turn requires a change of server architecture. Don’t ask – Ruby and Rails are a nightmare for breaking backwards compatibility with their APIs!

We’ll be switching to Apache, but it’ll run faster than our current LigHTTPd setup because of the use of a module called Passenger, which is a custom built, tailor-made way of running Rails stuff. This uses a specially built Ruby, too, which is about 30% faster than the previous version. In short it should be more reliable and quicker.

In passing, I’ve decided to remove explicit support for legacy browsers in an evolutionary, slight update to the “look” of the site. It’s a slightly cleaner but all-in-all similar design. It looks great in NetSurf and renders substantially faster than the old design. In Browse and Fresco, it’s a bit of a mess, but the content is carefully ordered to nonetheless present the information in a sensible order – title text, main navigation bar, body text and the sidebar stuff right at the end.

I can’t give a date for this but I can say that internally, it’s basically “ASAP”.

Nice update info – thanks. And if one of the improvements is the ability to paste tables into forum posts, that could come in handy.

The site uses lots of tables for layout, so that old RISC OS browsers like Browse and Fresco display something sane. These make NetSurf go slowly, particularly when nested – the forum uses them heavily.

[...] In passing, I’ve decided to remove explicit support for legacy browsers [...] In Browse and Fresco, it’s a bit of a mess, but the content is carefully ordered to nonetheless present the information in a sensible order – title text, main navigation bar, body text and the sidebar stuff right at the end.

Going by your posted observations and other comments at Web site access, maybe some of the Browse/Phoenix/Fresco users will switch to NetSurf if they’re able to. In any case, I expect you’ll include some sort of explanation for the decision in the News pages.