Abstraction on kuro5hin was talking about doing this a while back, but I haven't heard of any progress. In doing it, the first part that I think would be handy would be getting it CSS complaint.
Regarding CSS, a few things should happen: all font, bgcolor, etc vars and blocks should be replaced. There should be one block called 'css_defs' or somesuch, that will need an extra op. The op should look like http://www.scoopsite.com/css/default.css If its the default css sheet. There should be a block at the top of the page, css_include_block that will just create a link to include the stylesheet using the url above. If there is a certain section, then it should load the css for the block css_defs_<sectionname> if one exists, or just load the default. Then all FONT tags should be converted to SPANs. Course, that won't do a ton for the size of the page, but it will help, not having 'helvetica.....' 100 times on a page will help a lot.
Also, it should look fine if the user has css turned off, so it can't be used for formatting text or layout. Regarding xhtml compliance, I thought we were pretty good. Kuro5hin should be near good, since it stopped allowing P tags. But if you want to clean up the boxes and blocks, go for it.
On a related note, how many browsers support XHTML? Will the ones that don't render the page extremely bad? If this is going to block out a large number of users (like, netscape 4.* users, for example) I don't really want to implement it...
-hurstdog
