How to optimize screen real estate in a J2EE struts app?

Question

I am working on a old J2EE struts app which has very bad UI design. Most of the pages are misusing the screen real estate like there are uneven spaces among dropdown, labels, text boxes etc. Alignment of different items on page is not very efficient leading to space wastage. And sometimes users are forced to use unnecessary scroll bars which I find very irritating. I could have fixed it manually but there are around 250 such jsps, fixing them one-by-one will exceed my life expectancy. So I am wondering if there is any other way to solve this usability problem. I can think of below 2 options (please don't hate me if it sound thoroughly ridiculous, you can suggest whatever you find relevant)

1) Any open source API to scan my jsps and give recommendations where I can make improvements ?
2) What usability design standard should I follow to improve user experience ?

Any help will highly appreciated

Answer 1

1. Not that I am aware of. I myself just use the W3's online HTML and CSS validator whenever needed.

2. Semantic HTML. Really, that is it. This way you can control everything with just a CSS file.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, aligning these components correctly takes a lot of time, and must be done manually if you wish for a good layout. Whoever developed this before was also aware of how much time is needed for this, and decided not to take the time to properly layout fields.

This problem of yours probably has more to do with requirements than technology/development, so perhaps the best thing to do is apply grease to the squeakiest wheels (the users who are having problems), and consider all of these future change requests as job security.