newstalk

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I’m fairly calm and mild-mannered. So, for those who do, please excuse the following digression—I’m probably overreacting. For those who don’t know me from Adam, well, I’m not always like this. Really, I’m not.

I’ve dabbled some in web design these past few years, and I’ve gotten a taste for what I like and what I don’t. I admit to being a minimalist, of the KISS school. I like clean design that requires minimal upkeep. I like text. I like a sleek web page that transfers and loads in milliseconds. I like design that, in keeping with the original philosophy behind the world wide web, is unassuming and tolerant of as wide a variety of environments as possible, whether it be the size of the screen one uses or the alternative methods of access that people with disabilities use.

In summary, I’ve turned into a bit of a standards geek. Which is why, if you give me a poorly designed website to maintain, and sit me down in front of Dreamweaver, I get antsy.

Take note of this table:

Exhibit I:

tly so that it will work with my stylesheet and, oh yeah, so that it would validate. It still doesn’t come out quite right on this page, though, and it’s such a kludge I don’t pretend to understand why. To produce this table, the way it is designed on the site I’m working on, requires approximately 170 lines of HTML and two graphic images. 170 lines of html and two graphic images to produce a table 5 rows x 2 columns, with two column headers. My friends, this should not be. You can see the actual HTML code in all its grotesque splendor here.

Now, why has this miffed me so? The column you see above was originally only two rows. To update the page it came from, I needed to add some new dates. This should not be a difficult exercise. No. In order to not break the table, it took me roughly half-an-hour to read the HTML code, understand what it was doing and why, and replicate it for three more rows. This included at least 10-15 minutes working according to the comments included with the code (i.e. “end of dark brown row”, “beginning of light brown row”) which were just plain wrong. 30 minutes of wasted time in which I could have been doing all the other updates I need to do to the site, each of which has so far included its very own special cases and wrong-headed design.

There is a better way. Observe:

Exhibit II:

You can see the underlying code here. 20 lines or so of HTML, and not a single graphic, for a similar effect.

Now, if this were the only problem, then yes, the sullen anger I’ve been feeling all day would not be justified. But the entire site is designed this way, with reams of html doing stupid things that I could better in one measly hour with Mozilla Composer and a good text editor. I won’t go into their use of graphics for text headers, or the convoluted tables that they use to lay out the site which force every subsequent page into the same cramped, typecast pixel-box. I won’t explain the lengths I went to this afternoon to change one graphical-text header from a one-line header to two lines.

What I will explain, however, with calm, white-hot seething text, is this: the jokers who designed this site are so-called “creative consultants”, of the 90-buck-an-hour+adjustment sort. Now, I won’t fault their creativity: on the surface, the site is very slick-looking, and we’ve received many kudos and the like on how good it looks. But underneath the hood it is a bloody mess to maintain—function sacrificed on the black altar to aesthetic form.

My supervisor explained it to me this way: it’s job security for them. That means: they design a site, charge an arm and a leg, and they bill themselves as the only ones with the expertise to maintain it. If you insist, they put up their hands and let you struggle with their abomination-in-code for a while—a few days, a few weeks, a few months. Eventually you come across something you don’t know how to fix. They gladly fix it, for a “small” fee, then offer to take up the maintenance again, for which service they will then continue to charge until you’re out of arms and legs. Then they come for your first-born. At the end of it all when you’re lying on the pavement sucking on the curb, they hand you a pen and you reach for your checkbook and, spitting through broken and bloody teeth, you say, “Please sir, could I have some more?”

Well, I think that’s enough for the day. You get the idea. I promise that the next post will not include even so much as a whiff of rage or geeky web development talk. On my honor.

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On January 13th, 2004, this was trivial (Tags: geeky web development talk, HTML, sleek web page, USD) | | Subscribe to comments | Both comments and pings are currently closed