I thought some of you would be interested in reading my e-mail to Zuni.
Here are my ideas that could *possibly* improve the the forum performance. Judging from the performance enhancements of MSXML 3.0, it could definitely save quite a bit of server load as well.
I'm not exactly sure how you built FuseTalk, so I'll just make a bunch of assumptions.
A) To display the contents of a thread, Cold Fusion queries the data source, generates the appropriate HTML, and then sends off the results to the client. The HTML contents can grow quite large, especially with very long threads. According to Netscape 4.x that I use at work, some threads were 300+ KB.
Possible new scenario:
Cold Fusion queries the data source, generates an XML data (which may be validated through a schema or DTD), and sends the results to the clients. The XML data could not only contain contents, but information about the customizable elements (such as "allow PM to the user," and "allow viewing of user profile," etc). XML eliminates the need to generate repetitive code, and therefore it is much more compact than HTML. The returned XML results will be transformed into HTML on the client with an XSL stylesheet.
Possible Problems:
- I am not 100% sure if Cold Fusion can do this. I only use ASP.
- The client needs IE 5.x, which includes MSXML 2.0. MSXML 3.0 is much faster and has more features such as XSLT, but it is not included with the browsers by default. You could do a MSXML version checking and ask AT users to install MSXML 3.0.
- I don't have enough experience with XML to be certain whether this will provide a significant improvement, but it will sure save a lot of bandwidth.
- Maybe XML should be an optional feature. You will need to use the "traditional" (generating HTML with Cold Fusion) for Netscape and older IE any ways.
Other possibly cool features:
- XML can be asynchronously downloaded. This means that the "main layout" of the forum would stay as it is, but the XML data can be refreshed. This allows refreshing of threads by simply download an XML data (extremely compact) with updated thread messages. Maybe you could even add an option to refresh every couple of minutes for "hot threads."
- Based on the idea above, the client (IE5+) could also choose a preferred method of sorting, number of messages to be displayed per page, and so on. All these could be achieved within the client, and thereby not impacting server performance at all.
- You could safely allow HTML on message posts, too. Simply build a Schema that only allows "simple" and "safe" tags such as <p>, <b>, etc. If a "prohibited" tag such as <script> is entered, the XML parser (run on the server) would return an error as HTML is not validated. One drawback about this feature is that AT members must know some basic XML/XHTML rules. i.e. all tags must be closed, lower-case, etc.
- It'd be also cool if each member could have their own CSS file for their messages.
LMK what you think.
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