Again, thank you everyone for your feedback.  Although I'm tech savy, I'm
not an expert.  I know what AJAX is, but not the coding behind it and don't
really have the time to learn at the moment.  Same goes for auto-suggest and
tag clouds.  I don't think my skill level is as high as most on this list.
 (for now ;)

Aaron -- I really like the DuBois finding aid, it's beautiful!  Did you
generate it from one EAD or did you have to create secondary EAD's with
single <dsc> elements to get the series box folder listings?  Or maybe that
part was done with hand coding afterwards?  I was hesitant to use multiple
<dsc> elements as it goes against RLG best practices.  It's actually what
was done on the previous version of this finding aid.  Your presentation is
really nice though...might just have to do it.

Nathan

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 5:22 PM, Andrew Hankinson <[log in to unmask]
> wrote:

> Another option might be to create a PDF version of this document for the
> download. It's not *ideal*, but it would certainly alleviate many of the
> transfer/rendering problems. You can still index the EAD on the back-end,
> and maybe even provide section-level access via AJAX and some back-end
> document calls, but if you want to make the whole thing available I wouldn't
> do it in HTML.
>
> Is there any reason you need/want to keep it as a webpage?
>
> On 2010-12-06, at 3:04 PM, Ken Irwin wrote:
>
> > Nathan,
> >
> > Would it make sense to break this up into several documents and add a
> search function? You could still have a giant, one-page (and thus
> easily-printable) option, but maybe that wouldn't be the default.
> >
> > The search feature I'm envisioning would just be a search of key words in
> the title of a box. A tag-cloud sort of thing might be a useful way of
> making some of the keywords visible too.
> >
> > Ken
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Nathan Tallman
> > Sent: Monday, December 06, 2010 2:49 PM
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: [CODE4LIB] HTML Load Time
> >
> > Hi Cod4Libers,
> >
> > I've got a LARGE finding aid that was generated from EAD.  It's over 5 MB
> > and has caused even Notepad++ and Dreamweaver to crash.  My main concern
> is
> > client-side load time.  The collection is our most heavily used and the
> > finding aid will see a lot of traffic.  I'm fairly adept with HTML, but I
> > can't think of anything.  Does anyone have any tricks or tips to decrease
> > the load time?  The finding aid can be viewed at <
> > http://www.americanjewisharchives.com/aja/FindingAids/ms0361.html>.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Nathan Tallman
> > Associate Archivist
> > American Jewish Archives
>