One of our clients has gone to a third party company for a redesign of their site. Fair enough, their old one is looking pretty clunky these days and badly in need of recoding. But while the Graphic Designers have done a very good job creating a unified and attractive look for the site, the *ahem* “Web Designers” who carved it up have created an absolute monstrosity. Tables within tables within tables, an index page that consists of a Flash movie inside a table (just great for search engines that!), graphical headers with empty alt tags (the vision impaired? We don’t want no stinking vision impaired people on our site!), faulty doctypes, nary a meta tag to be seen, header tags either completely unused or scattered willy-nilly across the pages with gay abandon and no concern for proper hierarchy, paragraph breaks implemented with double BR tags – the list just goes on and on. If someone presented me with HTML like this as anything but a joke, I’d shoot them.
360id are undoubtedly good graphical designers, but if they’ve even ever heard of web standards it appears that they want no truck with them. Someone seriously needs to head down there with a copy of Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards and beat a few people around the head with it until they come to their senses.
(PS: In these, the waning days of our civilisation, nothing is too ridiculous to be taken seriously, so I had probably better state that the above is intended as a humourous expression of annoyance and I do not advocate or encourage beating anyone – at 360id or elsewhere – around the head with a copy of Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards, or any other book for that matter.)
(PPS: Some may attribute this diatribe to sour grapes over another company getting one of our clients – since we’ll still be providing a good chunk of their site functionality this is at best a minor factor in my disgruntlement. The major factor is that anyone could write code as antiquated as this in this day and age is a notion that deeply offends me.)
