Topic awaiting preservation: FireFox & web standards I miss you

[cry_in_the_desert_mode]

In my new position, I'm working on a site, that is part of a myriad of sites of a brand, made with table based layout, sloppy client side JS and not standard compliant markup. Thus the main site I'm working on is hardly browsable with FireFox. Alas, though the clear advantages they could get from the switch, the chances that I can show them the path to web standards are really slim. There's simply too much sites to care of and it would require to touch a lot of scripts scattered everywhere.

The good thing is that it makes me realize, if need be, how much I enjoy this browser and all its usefull features/extensions.

The bad thing is that it took me almost 3 hours to shift two links by 10px. Ok I began this new job only 2 days ago, the sites are powered by BroadVision which I never used before, but still : 3 freaking hours!!

[/cry_in_the_desert_mode]

<img src="spacer.if" width="10">

argh. I'm empathizing with you, that's really no fun.

JKM is getting rusty!
Quick, get the oil!

I once had to deal with a template that was attrocious. Not only the template itself, but amoung the pages that used the template. Instead of recycling the same spacer.gif, each one was unique in every single page. Something like 200+ copies of the exact same gif.

Need a drink, Poi?

I have a client who wanted to clean up a site. I spent some time looking through it, and gave him an estimate on how much time it would take to clean up the code & gain XHTML 1.0 Transitional validation. I gave him another estimate on a new site, 100% valid code from the ground up. It was cheaper than cleaning up the old site.

Seriously cheaper.

If they would have started with valid code to begin with......

To give you an idea, at the moment I'm working on one site of a branch of my employer. This very branch has not less than 25 sites in ~10 languages. Every sites, not just those of this branch, are driven by BroadVision since 2000-2001.

For sure going XHTML+CSS would cut drastically the bandwidth and hosting costs. Touch the scripts of one site is out of question. Since if we do it for one site, we'd better replicate them on all the sites and some have some features specific to a country/brand. It would be a nightmare.

JKMabry: When I saw the number of badly/never closed TRs and TDs I really wondered how IE manage to display the pages properly.

Pugzly: I'm not surprised. It took me 2 months to write the scripts extracting the 20,000+ pages of the website of the French Presidency, from 1995 to 2004, and transforming them in valid and (close to) semantic HTML while reshaping the URLs updating the crossed links. I let you imagine how many people and tools were involved on the site in 9 years ... and how much I was charged to the Elysée Palace.

warjournal: 200+ copies of the same gif!! WTF can anyone have between the ears to do that ?
What kind of drink do you have ?



(Edited by poi on 04-12-2005 20:57)

"warjournal: 200+ copies of the same gif!! WTF can anyone have between the ears to do that ?"

*takes a look at his Mario game, then wanders off whistling innocently...*

Meh, one day I'll have a website worth seeing...honest

wrayal: I think warjournal means 200+ physical copies, not 200+ calls/uses in the HTML markup.

Yeah, what Poi said. Not to mention the other junk that I had cleaned out. One HTML page went from 55k down to 10k in just template text by the time I was done.

It was one of the "make a website yourself with our wysiwyg software" kind of packages. Absolute trash and one of the reasons why I got mostly out of the business. Around here, there used to be plenty of jobs that were built from scratch and it was good. Then more folks started getting into bad wysiwyg software and would invariably need someone to clean it up. It was fun at first, but got a bit too taxing after a few fights. Fighting with clients and fighting with software is not fun after awhile.

Less stress and I'm a much better person for getting out. Then again, I was more on the personal side of the bizz as opposed to working for a company.

Poi, nothing but Captain Morgan right now. But I might be able to find some Bacardi if I dig around in the cupboards. Bring some Coke and I'll fire up the Nintendo.

warjournal: Thanks for the drink and the Nintendo

To go on the "I miss the good practices" topic, I ran some RegEx in UltraEdit to see the amount of content on a 60Kb page ( all external files excluded ), and there was less that 2Kb worth of text.

Ok, they will not want to change, that is the focus of the business. Change is hard and it sucks, you are new, use your ideas but don't make waves.

I have been in a similar situation and have won out, but it is a tough battle, and takes time.

Brush up on your reglular expressions, spend time coming up with regular expressions to handle each and every change you are going to make. I would use a language like perl or python and create a huge archive of small regular expressions which can be used to solve every problem you come into. Don't do the stuff by hand, the reason the pages got into the state they are in now is because people would not spend the 10 minutes needed to solve the problem once, they would spend the 5 minutes to solve the immediate problem. The value of this can potensially be huge in the long run. I do tons of XML hacking in my current job and I write a little python scripts to handle as much of any job as it possible can, because sometime down the road I am going to say, oh, I want to do functionX to N objects, and will have the program ready to go.

While doing the trivial tasks take time to really understand the code. Find a very small but important section of the code, and then spend a bit of time cleaning it up. Then you can make the sugestion to replace the section, also have a small program which will apply these changes to all of our files. Supply screen shots of the look and feel in each browser to show that there is no change in display, also give a rough estimate of the amount of time saved through your changes in future changes.

Do this 3 or 4 times and you will find that slowly people will start to take notice of the benifit to the standards compliant method, and if not, by the time you have replaced 5 or 6 major elements the whole site will be standards compliant anyways.

It is an uphill battle, but in the end it is all worth it.

Dan @ Code Town

WarMage: Nice and sneaky approach.

Technically hard to put in practice due to the constraints of time, the 4 staging levels before reaching the production servers, and the internationnal nature of the company. But, promised, I won't give up the fight.

Yeah, I like WarJournal's approach as well.

Sorry to hear the torture, poi, but once you fix all the crap they have going on you'll have such a sense of accomplishment (or relief) that nothing will be able to compare. Keep at it, you're doing the internet as a whole a tiny favor by doing so.

---
Website

Or, possibly, the answer is not to fix those sites, but rather accept what is, and design all sites from here-on in with good, clean, compliant, semantic code.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

I just sent a load of ressources/websites about xhtml+css to 1 co-worker and 2 superiors The examples of WIRED and ESPN might ring a bell.

Beside, I just saw how they do a simple 2 levels vertical menu like this one. It's dead simple, they made one DIVs per 1st level items. Each DIV has a table listing all the 1st level items and only the 2nd levels items corresponding to the current 1st level items. And they show/hide the DIVs when you hover a 1st level item. Why doing clean and simple when you can do overloaded and complex ?

For 5 items in the 1st level, and 25 in the 2nd level, the HTML markup weighs 28 Kb and 470 lines. Insane.



(Edited by poi on 04-14-2005 10:44)

Especially if you consider that the menu works fine so lnog as you move the mouse cursor *up* the table, but as soon as you start moving it down it just two items at a time becuase of the shifting size of the table/div nightmare.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

yep, the usability of such menus is questionnable.