(no subject)

[gothwalk]

The HTML I'm currently working is so bad I could cry. If I ever get my hands on the moron who put it together, I shall carefully strangle him with a printout of all the useless extra stuff he put in here. There are repeated occurences of <font color="#ffffff" face="Arial" size="2">&nbsp;</font><font color="#ffffff" face="Arial" size="2">&nbsp;</font> - when what they wanted was two spaces. And it'd be almost OK if it was consistently Arial, or size 2, or white - but it's not. This guy thought carefully about what size, font and colour his spaces were to be, by the looks of things. And there are random bold tags scattered up and down the documents like ornaments on a Christmas Tree.

Razzle frazzle.

Comments

How about...

[mytholder.livejournal.com]

Product of some dodgy WYSIWYG editor, perchance?

[iresprite.livejournal.com]

This sounds like it was generated by something like FrontPage, and the spaces just happened to be places where maybe old text had been formatted but then removed, leaving some spaces behind.

In any case, I am sorry to hear and offer a good-sized maul for your venting pleasure.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

Frontpage was involved at some point alright, but I'm used to Frontpage by now, and its various awkwardnesses. No, this is a document that was altered, as far as I can see, by several people, possibly all at once, each of whom knew what a few html tags did, but nothing about html otherwise. So there are, for instance, very careful rows of non-breaking spaces which will position things prefectly as long as you're using IE 4.something on Windows 2000 at 800x600.

And worst of all, there are <u> tags in here.

[kajivar]

<u> tags are bad?

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

From a long-term usability point of view, yeah. Underlines on the web mean links, to the vast majority of people. Underlines that aren't links frustrate people, as a first effect, and then go on to devalue that convention, so that we have to find other ways to indicate links, like "click here", or graphic buttons.

Re:

[kajivar]

Ahhh, understandable. Thanks for the explanation.

[iresprite.livejournal.com]

And worst of all, there are <u> tags in here.

*runs screaming in blind terror*

*returns for a nice hot cup of tea*

I wish you all the best in blowing that doc to oblivion.

[suibhne-geilt.livejournal.com]

I'll be that if you read the 'useless' html tags backwards, you'd find a message from Satan.

What version of Dreamweaver?

[cheerfulcynic.livejournal.com]

I've always found it to be pretty conservative in the amount of crud it shoves in, compared to FrontPage anyway. I once had the misfortune to open something in Frontpage Express and had to throw it away and start again, it made such a mess of it.

[ailbhe]

It looks like word-generated HTML to me, possibly also edited in FrontPage.

[wyvernfriend.livejournal.com]

Well there are people who just don't understand labour saving word processing applications - like the dweeb I had to deal with who SET tabs across the page to get to one side and then had to use spaces because they didn't understand how decimal tabs worked (it was for an invoice) I used to have to kill things (virtually) regularly after dealing with that mess.