Ecsyle | Blog | As if the internet didn’t have enough shitty websites

As if the internet didn’t have enough shitty websites

April 26 2007

Im losing it over here. I am working on updating the look of a new clients website. Sounds easy enough, just open up the templates, rewrite the shitty html, and be done with it.

No fucking way is anything ever that easy.

First of all. It was written before web standards became the new hotness. I am talking a shitload of nested tables and font tags, no real hierarchy, misuse of style sheets, improperly written tags, heavy use of deprecated tags, inaccessible web forms, etc. Its a fucking mess. And this was after an “seo” company got their hands on it and “optimized” it for high visibility and all that.

Ok, now, i can deal with shitty html. Its really just a matter of taking what exists, digging out the meat, implanting it into a healthy body, and throwing away the fat. Some freaky kind of Frankenstein operation. A couple of hours and new life has been breathed into this website.

Again, no way is anything ever this easy.

Not only was the html written when websites were still being chiseled into stone tablets, it is also embedded into hundreds of PHP functions named accurately for what it is displaying, brilliant names like “section()” and “section2()”. Ok, so this adds more hours to the work. Again, its not that bad. That is, until I actually jumped into the deep end of this spaghetti ocean.

Holy. Shit.

Let me show you an example of how EVERY SINGLE LING OF HTML is written in this website:

printf("<input class=input");
   printf(" type=text size=$search_box_size name=keyword>&nbsp;");

That’s right. The programmer felt it was better to split the input tag into two separate printf statements. Here is a better example:

printf("<td id=leftNavCell valign=top");
if (file_exists("shop_image/vendor/L_bgimage.png") &&
filesize("shop_image/vendor/L_bgimage.png") > 0) {
  printf(" style=\"background-image: ");
  printf("url(shop_image/vendor/L_bgimage.png);\"");
} else if (file_exists("shop_image/vendor/L_bgimage.jpg") &&
       filesize("shop_image/vendor/L_bgimage.jpg") > 0) {
  printf(" style=\"background-image: ");
  printf("url(shop_image/vendor/L_bgimage.jpg);\"");
} else if (file_exists("shop_image/vendor/L_bgimage.gif") &&
       filesize("shop_image/vendor/L_bgimage.gif") > 0) {
  printf(" style=\"background-image: ");
  printf("url(shop_image/vendor/L_bgimage.gif);\"");
} else {
  if (file_exists("shop_image/vendor/nav_bgimage.png") &&
  filesize("shop_image/vendor/nav_bgimage.png") > 0) {
printf(" style=\"background-image: ");
printf("url(shop_image/vendor/L_bgimage.png);\"");
  } else if (file_exists("shop_image/vendor/nav_bgimage.jpg") &&
    filesize("shop_image/vendor/nav_bgimage.jpg") > 0) {
printf(" style=\"background-image: ");
printf("url(shop_image/vendor/L_bgimage.jpg);\"");
  } else if (file_exists("shop_image/vendor/nav_bgimage.gif") &&
    filesize("shop_image/vendor/nav_bgimage.gif") > 0) {
printf(" style=\"background-image: ");
printf("url(shop_image/vendor/L_bgimage.gif);\"");
  }
}
printf(">\n");

That big ass chunk of code is used to create a single td tag specific to a very small, unimportant part of the overall website template. That’s right. Just one table cell took 29 lines of code. The friggin body tag was over 50.

So here I am now wondering if I should go print out every single line of code at 9pt font, bundle it up, find the original developer, and drop the shit on his/her head, or explain to the client that it is in their best interest to scrap the whole site and start fresh?

posted in : Web Dev