Old Scary Code
I just completed the redesign of a site for ACT Home Inspection Service and during the process made the mistake of taking a peek at the source of the original site. Mind you, this site was three or four years old (no one could really remember) but I can definitely say that I’ve never written code like that, even 4 years ago when I didn’t even know what a web standard was. In the end, I was glad I looked because now I can say its some of the worst code ever slopped together and thrown on the internet.
From the markup I could tell that the site was done with Adobe GoLive 4. Not that this is an excuse or anything. Some person still designed the site and I assume they had a choice in how they put things together. Here are some of the highlights, or more appropriately, lowlights of the site.
- The entire site was done in 2 pages. The second page had several anchors so that menu links from page 1 could jump to a certain spot in page 2.
- Each page was a whopping 18K in size, half of which was the same mess of javascript repeated on each.
- All of the linking was done using a crazy combo of images, proprietary markup and scripting.
- The overall HTML structure was a series of nested 12 column tables.
Here’s a nice example of a main navigation button:
<td width="103" height="53" colspan="1" rowspan="2" valign="top" align="left" xpos="32"><csobj w="98" h="43" t="Button" ht="media/Who72over.gif" csclick="B676E8313"><a href="#" onmouseover="return CSIShow(/*CMP*/'button3',1)" onmouseout="return CSIShow(/*CMP*/'button3',0)" onclick="CSAction(new Array(/*CMP*/'B676E8313'));return CSClickReturn()"><img src="media/Who72.gif" width="98" height="43" name="button3" border="0"></a></csobj></td>
What the heck is that all about? Never seen anything like it. Have you?
Comments
12. November 2004
In 1999 I played around with Adobe GoLive 4 long enough to see some of the terrible markup that you mention in this post. For example, I believe that xpos=’32’ attribute is used by GoLive for some type of positioning. It’s definitely ugly—I wonder if the newer version of GoLive produces cleaner markup?
22. January 2005
Our high school’s website was produced by the IT teacher probably sometime in 2001 or so. Maybe 2002. Not only is it a crappy looking website, but it is full of extremely scary code like that. I also guessed that she had used GoLive, but I wasn’t sure. This article clears that up. I also noticed when I took the computers class that she taught us old HTML. Like really really deprecated code. No CSS. When I asked her about it (because I had actually read our textbook and determined that she wasn’t teaching the right stuff) she said that the new standards would be too complex to teach, and that most of her students weren’t going to use their HTML knowledge. Luckily, that IT teacher left us, and I get to be a part of redesigning our site.
1. December 2007
yeah, I need to clear code on the site with code-mess like this. it was designed recently by some corporate designers, and had 318 errors in validation as xhtml tr. on each page
lol
oxyk
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