Please don’t do this!
Posted on | November 18, 2009 | No Comments
I remember when I was first starting out learning about web development in the late nineties and not knowing and appreciating elegant coding. I was more preoccupied with trying to put up “pretty” web pages and was looking for a tool that could help me achieve the dream with minimal coding. I tried out several different web page editors including Dreamweaver, BBEdit, and FrontPage. Dreamweaver wasn’t user friendly-enough for me. BBEdit was too code-oriented. FrontPage was more for me because I was accustomed to other Microsoft products at the time and I achieved (in a manner of speaking) what I was looking to do.
I showed one of my coworkers who was a programmer what I was working on and this comment of his stuck with me: “What ugly code!” He pointed out how inefficient the code was and how difficult it was to follow. At that time, there was a distinctive separation between web designers and programmers, mainly because web applications were not as ubiquitous as they are now. So, I didn’t necessarily see this as a programming problem.
Now, I’m wiser and probably less impatient when it comes to coding so I do a lot of it by hand. I’ve abandoned FrontPage with a vengenance and I only use editors when I need to do repetitive tasks.
But flash forward, and now I’m doing some work to revamp a site which I’ve been postponing for a long time. Take a look at this code:
<p style=”text-indent: -.25in; margin-left: .5in”><span style=”font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Symbol”>
·<span style=”font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"”> </span></span>Receives gift with gratitude<p style=”text-indent: -.25in; margin-left: .5in”><span style=”font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Symbol”>·<span style=”font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"”>
</span></span>
I’ve learned from the error of my previous ways and now it’s come back to haunt me! I have to recode these pages with Microsoft FrontPage WYSIWYG-speak. Span tags everywhere with complementary font tags, text-indents, webbots, and more cr**. I hope that my penance for using FrontPage and actually putting up web sites using that tool is satisfied with the overhaul of code I need to do on this site (Tidy hasn’t helped, by the way).
So please, if you’re still using FrontPage, please graduate to Expression Web, or better yet, Dreamweaver. If you’re a web site owner who has a web site like this, please understand that you will probably have to start from scratch and get rid of your old site. It’s not worth it to keep it. If you want an overhaul or slight redesign based on your current site, give me a call. I don’t think that I will clean up the code on the old site, though. You probably don’t have the money and I don’t think that I will have the time 
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