Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

Clavius: Oct 21, 2007; Howdy!

code:

        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

Hey friend who is still living in 2002 web design land, you should consider a few more modern techniques. *Many links and hours of advice*

code:

                                </div>
                            </div>
                        </div>
                    </div>
                </div>
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

# ¿ Sep 15, 2011 11:41

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 13:26

Clavius: Oct 21, 2007; Howdy!

gold brick posted:

That reminds me of a coworker I used to have. He (still) prefers table layouts, but asked me once how I would lay out a simple form using divs, etc. I looked it over without saying anything for about 5-6 seconds before he said "Well, if we were doing tables, I know I wouldn't have to think this hard".

TOO MUCH THINKING

It could be worse, he could get on board and move onto the next phase: Replacing table tr and td tags with div tags and floating goddamn everything instead of actually learning how to separate layout and content properly. That poo poo is impossible to fix. I can at least see what the incompetent gently caress has broken in a table layout.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2011 16:51

Clavius: Oct 21, 2007; Howdy!

Sigh. After all my hard work educating and pestering and pesuasive arguments.

code:

<!-- main layout table -->
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%">
  <tr>
    <td align="center">

      <!-- header table -->
      <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="800">
        <tr>
         <td width="600">

           <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
             <tr>
               <td>

I turn my back for five minutes and come back to

DONT LEECH IMAGES

Somebody fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Oct 7, 2011

# ¿ Oct 7, 2011 09:51

Clavius: Oct 21, 2007; Howdy!

# ¿ Dec 7, 2011 15:31

Clavius: Oct 21, 2007; Howdy!

TRex EaterofCars posted:

In order to get rounded corners just right I've had to resort to autogenerating html like that. It sucks but them's the breaks on an internet that allows IE.

Yeah don't do this. It's much better to just let IE have the square corners and use border-radius. It's extremely easy to bring round an ACM or client to this way of thinking when you tell them it will take X amount of extra hours to implement and quantify that extra cost to them. There's also the billion other arguments such as clean code, scalability, future planning, accessibility, load time, maintenance time blah blah blah blah, but the easiest one to sell the average person you actually have to sell this to is just to quantify the money they lose by implementing a meaningless piece of flair that adds nothing to the functionality of a product in a ten year old peripheral.

e: and if that fails and you absolutely must have the corners in ie, use a js framework or something to patch up the lack of functionality, don't make the real browsers suffer with terrible coding practice. CSS3PIE was pretty rad the last time I went out of my way to make the design identical down to ie6.

Clavius fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Dec 8, 2011

# ¿ Dec 8, 2011 00:27

Clavius: Oct 21, 2007; Howdy!

TRex EaterofCars posted:

Lecture me all you want, specs are specs and customer is rich, I'm not going to rile him up over more money for me. I'll give him the "this will take X hours" and if he says "ok" then I do it.

Like I said, there are much better ways to pander to terrible browsers than nesting divs horribly. Rounded corners is especially easy using what I posted there.

Vertical centering in CSS is loving awful. Mostly I just design to not have to center vertically because more often than not a fixed height is terrible practice for when blind people want bigger font sizes and stuff like that. It's much better to let the heights of elements be dictated by a base from the font size using em's. Sometimes it's not possible but ideally...

Generally though CSS2 isn't set up for layout and we use a series of nasty hacks because it's a bit less horrible than tables. CSS3 has some real real nice layout controls going, but it's one of those things we can't just apply the progressive enhancement argument to like rounded corners and shadows and stuff. The old browsers will totally gently caress it up rather than degrade it gracefully.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2011 17:54

Clavius: Oct 21, 2007; Howdy!

Wheany posted:

"Until now this was the only way to get juice from an orange"

Nice, the cursor pointer style is on a hover event :regd09:

# ¿ Dec 9, 2011 16:38

Clavius: Oct 21, 2007; Howdy!

On a temp contract with a company right now doing some pretty cool work. Finished it up early and they asked me to spend a week just tweaking their online shop built in netsuite to make it more brand consistent and seo friendly or whatever. So okay, never used netsuite, how bad can it be?

It's like house of leaves in here, the deeper you dig the more the tables expand into more tables, I haven't seen anything close to this bad in ten years of development, even by ten years ago standards. It's fascinating.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2013 06:18

Clavius: Oct 21, 2007; Howdy!

code:

<CENTER><FONT class=Apple-style-span size=2><BR></FONT></CENTER>

lol

# ¿ Feb 21, 2013 07:31

Clavius: Oct 21, 2007; Howdy!

..btt posted:

I like how you complain about a 10-year-old style of html while using a 12 year old OS and listening to 20 year old music

I live in a hostel a long long way from home right now, my netbook can only handle xp.

I turned off pretty much everything unnecessary because it might die at any moment... I want to see the mountain the 3d thing generates but there's a good chance that processing that lot will burn this little guy down.

# ¿ Feb 22, 2013 10:51

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 13:26

Clavius: Oct 21, 2007; Howdy!

Done with table mountain for now but there's plenty more horror in the main site. The first thing I see is hundreds upon hundreds of raw .html files in the main dir, each with 300 lines of identical horrendous code for the header alone. I don't even know where to begin.

A choice one from the 300, all on one line:

code:

<td onmousemove="$(this).css('background', '#343434')"
onmouseout="$(this).css('background', 'none')" width="150"
align="center"><a class="topMenu"
href="techsupport.html">Technical Support</a></td>
<td class="topMenuDivider"></td>

Wish me luck, I'm goin in.

Clavius fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Mar 7, 2013

# ¿ Mar 7, 2013 01:34

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!