I have the task of writing the database/dynamic stuff behind an e-commerce site. The design work and static pages are done by a professional design web dev house in Brisbane, and yesterday I got hold of their work. My job now is to merge their stuff with the shopping cart and other components I've written.
And it's now I see how far I've come with my web dev techniques. This professional design and web dev house has pages that features the following: 1. every page contains the CSS in text in the <head> tag, not in a linked style sheet. 2. every page uses tables for layout. 3. all the tables are nested to multiple levels 4. many of the cells or <tr> tags have styles inline, or they use the bgcolor attribute (not consistently either way) 5. javascript is both typed at the top of the page in the <head> and also inline, scattered throughout the page. 6. no ULs anywhere. The navigation is also nested tables. 7. there is no doctype. 8. the code is scattered all over the page which tells me this professional dev studio doesn’t look at their code at all, only uses wysiwyg tools. 9. they uploaded the code so EVERYTHING goes in the root level of the site, no folders at all except they did put the images into an images folder, so you have to give them half a point for that. Now I have to work my own stuff into this site, and it's proving much more difficult than with my own work. My own code is organised, it's laid out on the page, commented and indented, I use includes to keep the elements of code separated and easy to find, and I don’t have any nested tables anywhere. In fact I haven’t used tables for anything except tabular data for 18 months now. This code just looks old fashioned and amateur. It's inaccessible, and difficult to maintain. Their page weight is about three times what it needs to be because the javascript and styles are downloaded with each page view, and the nested tables add enormously to the code weight. I resent the fact that this professional design house has accepted cash-type money from my client to design the public side of the web site and produced such a shoddy job. Not only that, I have to work inside it, to make all my work function in this dogs-breakfast of a mess. Now I see how far I have come in my development. My own sites have much smaller pages for the same content, they load faster, they're far more efficient, accessible, and easy to maintain than this pile of spaghetti. Now I have to decide whether I want to spend some of my own time now redoing their work, thereby easing the road for myself down the track, or because I wont get paid for that, just go along with it and work with it. Just venting. Thanks for being patient with me. Cheers Mike Kear Windsor, NSW, Australia Adobe Certified Advanced ColdFusion Developer AFP Webworks Pty Ltd http://afpwebworks.com Full Scale ColdFusion hosting from A$15/month -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.446 / Virus Database: 268.18.6/709 - Release Date: 3/03/2007 8:12 AM ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
