Bad HTML
January 31st, 2003 11:29 PM
It blows my mind that any web browser can put up with HTML that is used on the internet. I just looked at the HTML that is spit out of the Wells Fargo online banking, and it’s simply amazing. Obviously an SGML parser wouldn’t be able to make sense of it. Even a regex parser would be tricky. On this one page there are all sorts of errors that are just plain stupid.
Tag attributes are either double quoted (as appropriate) or used as barewords, even for URLs which contain all sorts of need-to-be-quoted characters. Tags and attributes appear in both upper and lower case (often mixed in the same tag). There is no DOCTYPE. Styling is done through both HTML and CSS.
Who is being paid to develop these things, and then completely fucking up?
#HTML
People that don’t know what they’re doing in the first place :) Seriously, though, even with the bad economy, there’s still a huge market for web developers that don’t know how to write raw HTML or even use DreamWeaver well. They convince companies they know what they’re doing and then just blindly copy-and-paste from web development web sites without ever learning how to do it right. Not naming any names, but I see this all the time. And don’t even get me started on the similar phenomenon among know-nothing programmers… :)
Posted by: gary on February 3rd, 2003 3:41 AM