Still As Life

One of the most annoying thing's I have ever come across in my web design experience, is when working on a website with another designer, they are adding formatting, either in HTML or using inline styles, in the HTML file instead of in the CSS file. This is extremely frustrating when I try and do things using the external style sheet and I find I don't have the control over them that I should have, and this is frustration is compounded, when I know that I wrote the style that should do it myself and all of a sudden, it's not there anymore and I have to go hunting through the HTML looking for whatever snippet of code he has added or taken out of the style sheet.

Of course to make things even more difficult, he has added it in multiple HTML documents so I have to go through 30 odd files and remove or modify this tag to do whatever I needed.

His reasoning is that this makes the code easier to manage, but I really don't see it, it just seems to create more work from where I'm sitting.

So the only way I can see that this can be even worse, is that he is my boss so I can hardly complain about his coding practice, despite how illogical his reasoning is.

If there is one thing I can't stress enough to people, it is to write your code to the World Wide Web Consortium's standards. Standards compliant code is NOT hard to write, especially if you just use one of the Transitional standards. There's a whole stack of free information and tutorials on it at the W3 Schools website too.

Learn it, do it.

Perhaps I'm the only one that finds this annoying, but as good as PHP is, it seems to me that he is using if excessively and all he is really managing to do is slow the loading time down.

For example, we have had a problem with 100% heights specified in the style sheet where all browsers read that correctly, except for Internet Explorer which didn't read it at all, so the height has to be manually specified for it. I figured out that if you specify the height in the HTML it works in Internet Explorer, so we just have to manually specify the height for each page (yay). So he is using PHP to write an if else statement in the HTML document that says if the browser is Internet Explorer, make the height this much, else make it 100%.

This is completely unnecessary though as all the other browsers ignore the height="" tag anyway and use the height specified in the style sheet. You can set the height to 10 in the HTML and the other browsers will still do it as 100%, as they should. So really, this PHP statement is a waste of his time, my time, the server's CPU time, and ultimately, the user's loading time.

This particular statement is not big I know and should still be executed quite fast, but there are statements like this all over the place that just waste time, and time always adds up.

Labels: code, internet, rants, special interest