Re:The Surprising Path to a Faster NYTimes.com
by thezilch on Wednesday September 24, 2014 @01:53PM
(#8362950)
In 1996 (or as late as early 2000s), many published texts were via tools like Dreamweaver, where the publisher would checkout / lock a file, make static changes, and save the file, directly on prod. Like you said, it's not surprising at all they have a large portion of their articles in static HTML files.
Re:The Surprising Path to a Faster NYTimes.com
by eitanmk on Wednesday September 24, 2014 @04:17PM
(#8363876)
Exactly. To compound the issue, older content may not fit into our current schema, so there are other data issues that need to be solved. Adding hand-coded HTML to pages was quite common 10 years ago, so parsing that into the structures we work with today isn't always straightforward and difficult to automate.
It seems reasonable (and possibly low) for a 90 days estimate to extract the content from the variety of versions of static page, structure it, and then publish it in a more modern fashion.
It's all very well to say they should have used a more efficient system from the start, but "the start" in this case is 1996, which is the wild west in terms of best practices.