Comment On A Long Way to the Top

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Addendum (2009-06-19 09:07):
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A client of ours declined our help in migrating several web apps from one server to another. IIRC there were 3 apps of ours and sundry other apps and static web sites. So after a few days of continued errors we stepped in and found...

...a directory for each of our apps each containing a copy of the entire web root (many GBs x3). I daren't look in the others.

Thank God for standards. These days, you can be guaranteed that if you create a fully standards compliant website it will display perfectly in any browser. Except Microsoft Internet Explorer of course. 60% market share you say? Shit!

What? Conformity to web standards were bad in the past? Say it ain't so!

He found some file and a (backup?) folder and then the story just ends. It seems like the exact details of the wtf are a bit of a mystery.

Anonymous:

Thank God for standards. These days, you can be guaranteed that if you create a fully standards compliant website it will display perfectly in any browser. Except Microsoft Internet Explorer of course. 60% market share you say? Shit!

Make a page about open standards, FLOSS, alternative systems and other technical matters. I haven't seen an IE UA in logs of my blog for several years (except my checking if IE displays it at all).

The real WTF is betting your company's online presence on someone who just got "his first real web development job."

No, wait, getting your site "professionally designed" is a certain course to WTFland. Or is it the subsequent decision to manage it in house?

"As a whole, the website looked pretty decent... so long as you viewed it at 800x600."

Ahh, there it is. Guess what. Other people don't have your computer. The internet connects everything to everything. So you have to code for everything. Not just for your thing. I'm going to have to start carrying a hammer to get people's attention before saying this, because otherwise they just don't listen.

"JavaScript-based navigation menu"

OK definitely TRWTF. The A HREF tag is for navigation. Javascript is for pop-ups, cross site scripting, identity theft, drive by downloads, and other types of malware.

"tables set to 757 pixels wide"

Kill people who do this. They obviously are incapable of comprehending other people don't have your computer.

"19 tables nested"

I give up.

plink:

He found some file and a (backup?) folder and then the story just ends. It seems like the exact details of the wtf are a bit of a mystery.

I know. That's what made me go, "WTF!?"

Yes, I've been in pretty much that situation. Forget trying to reformat the existing pages - in most cases it's completely hopeless. Create a new HTML/CSS template from scratch, and copy the text across page by page. It's bloody boring, but at least it'll only drive you half-mad - which is a factor of 2 improvement - and you end up with a working site in the end.

Calm Mint:

getting your site "professionally designed" is a certain course to WTFland.

... because those "professional" designers are almost always graphic designers who have not the first glimmer of a clue about software design, meaning they waste a lot of money and HTML to create something that looks great on one computer.

And, in case you forgot already, other people don't have your computer. So it looks like boiled vomit on the other nine billion computers on the planet.

No, I don't care for graphic designers who wander away from their magazine ads and think they can make web sites.

Bob:

plink:

He found some file and a (backup?) folder and then the story just ends. It seems like the exact details of the wtf are a bit of a mystery.

I know. That's what made me go, "WTF!?"

TRWTF is the punchline. Or rather the lack of one. Again.

?:

TRWTF is the punchline. Or rather the lack of one. Again.

The punchline only works at 800x600 and if you don't scroll down before joke loads.

ah, the good old days before css2...

Anon:

Bob:

plink:

He found some file and a (backup?) folder and then the story just ends. It seems like the exact details of the wtf are a bit of a mystery.

I know. That's what made me go, "WTF!?"

TRWTF is the punchline. Or rather the lack of one. Again.

It's not the end. It's just the beginning of an entire employment (perhaps career) full of WTFness. It's the first step of a WTF Journey. That's the WTF.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with dreading feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

(pace Tolkien)

The meta-WTF is TDWTFers not recognizing the epic story of setting out to defeat, against all odds, the greatest evil (IE6 brokenness) of our time. Sheesh, everyone expects a neatly-wrapped story, bedecked in easy-to-ROFL punchline, in one half-hour episode.

Area webmaster maintains poorly written site. Finds backup.

It all just sounds like an average old-style Web page that needs to be debugged. Nothing all that unusual, even the row/column count. You get used to seeing it. It's always nice to see one that's properly done with CSS, but most pages contain an amount of that sort of approach. Even this site uses some layout tables, as well as deeply nested div tag soup. Grass house throwing stones...

Maybe the website is recursive - it is a rarely used technique.

"Recursive Site Development" is an example of "Recursive Site Development"

21152691 by 889038291? Nearly 19 quadrillion cells?

Excellent story! "crm_useless"? Hahaha!

I liked the punch line. Not 'guffaw', but it'll get me through my work day.

Don't listen to all these other trolls.

You know, people bash table layouts, but I really don't see anything wrong with them. In this case, obviously, the nested table structure is effed, but in some cases the table can make a layout simpler. For example: the 3 column layout. If someone can give me a 3 column layout that:
A) has the left column, percentage width, on the absolute left of the window
B) has the right column, percentage width, on the absolute right of the window
C) has the middle column expand in between the 2 uniformly with the borders staying the same size
More Simply than with a 3 column table, I'd love to see it. My arguement is not for this abomination, but a simple table layout is often much easier to do (and read) than a mess of divs that are designed to do the same thing.

No, its filename. Somebody had to say it.

It also happened to live in a directory that Matt had not seen before, and where he found a full copy of the entire site, file for file.

SR:

...a directory for each of our apps each containing a copy of the entire web root (many GBs x3). I daren't look in the others.

Sounds like FrontPage to me.

Crabs:

If someone can give me a 3 column layout

It's called CSS display:table - all the features of tables (except col/rowspan), but with proper semantic markup. Take a look at CSS 2 some day. It's been possible in most browsers for many years. The only reason it couldn't be used before now was IE only got around to implementing it in IE 8.

If you don't need different backgrounds (borders are easy), then it's extremely easy to do what you want with two floats for the side columns (with side borders), and a central column with margins left and right (plus borders overlapping the others). This even works in IE 6 and 7. There are ugly ways to get backgrounds too, but that may not fit your requirement so well.

He tried to use Dreamweaver to -fix- code? Well, that'd be his first web development lesson learnt!

We call it "Dreamcleaver" for a reason.

Calm Mint:

The A HREF tag is for navigation. Javascript is for pop-ups, cross site scripting, identity theft, drive by downloads, and other types of malware.

Hear, hear! Well said, sir - I couldn't agree more.

Calm Mint:

Javascript is for pop-ups, cross site scripting, identity theft, drive by downloads, and other types of malware.

There's your WTF.

"Matt found a style sheet buried in an include file. It's filename? crm_useless.css."

Apostrophe's and they're use's.

TarquinWJ:

It all just sounds like an average old-style Web page that needs to be debugged. Nothing all that unusual, even the row/column count. You get used to seeing it. It's always nice to see one that's properly done with CSS, but most pages contain an amount of that sort of approach. Even this site uses some layout tables, as well as deeply nested div tag soup. Grass house throwing stones...

Grass house? It's *glass* house.

eddie pasterkak:

"Matt found a style sheet buried in an include file. It's filename? crm_useless.css."

For a junior developer I can ignore all of the problems he encountered, that he uses dreamweaver, etc.

My biggest problem was that it took him that long to find the style sheet. Style sheets don't get hidden it should have been the first item checked.

Calm Mint:

...

Ahh, there it is. Guess what. Other people don't have your computer. The internet connects everything to everything. So you have to code for everything. Not just for your thing. I'm going to have to start carrying a hammer to get people's attention before saying this, because otherwise they just don't listen.

...

You should carry round a Heron instead. I'd be wary of someone wielding a hammer, but 'who's that bloke with the long legged bird?' would get my attention every time.

TarquinWJ:

It all just sounds like an average old-style Web page that needs to be debugged. Nothing all that unusual, even the row/column count. You get used to seeing it. It's always nice to see one that's properly done with CSS, but most pages contain an amount of that sort of approach. Even this site uses some layout tables, as well as deeply nested div tag soup. Grass house throwing stones...

Grass house? What are you, a Hobbit?

anon:

TarquinWJ:

Grass house throwing stones...

Grass house? It's *glass* house.

Indeedy, In the grass house, the tribal chief stowed thrones ('til one fell through the ceiling and killed him). But I guess you have to know the spoonerism version to understand that. Ref

SoonerMatt:

eddie pasterkak:

"Matt found a style sheet buried in an include file. It's filename? crm_useless.css."

For a junior developer I can ignore all of the problems he encountered, that he uses dreamweaver, etc.

My biggest problem was that it took him that long to find the style sheet. Style sheets don't get hidden it should have been the first item checked.

I thought this meant that he found a style sheet that had been discarded during development of the original site, hence the name crm_useless.css.

I would assume a site that uses '19 quadrillion cells' wouldn't use style sheets.

arty:

?:

TRWTF is the punchline. Or rather the lack of one. Again.

The punchline only works at 800x600 and if you don't scroll down before joke loads.

We have a winner!

Crabs:

You know, people bash table layouts, but I really don't see anything wrong with them...

Congratulations! You're officially part of the problem.

...If someone can give me a 3 column layout that:
A) has the left column, percentage width, on the absolute left of the window
B) has the right column, percentage width, on the absolute right of the window
C) has the middle column expand in between the 2 uniformly with the borders staying the same size
More Simply than with a 3 column table, I'd love to see it...

Except simplicity isn't the issue (that's the reason the graphic designers use tables...they're easier to understand).

The issues are appropriateness, semantics, and how you decouple layout from content. Your simple table won't look great on my blackberry...or in lynx, although it may be fine in your browser.

That aside, your desired layout can be accomplished with 3 appropriately-classed/identified divs and a little bit of CSS.

And, of course, the browser can cache the stylesheet, so you save bandwidth.

Wait...you weren't just trolling, were you?

A simple javascript to detect IE6 and resize the window to 800x600 would have solved the issue.

Learn to deal!

TarquinWJ:

Indeedy, In the grass house, the tribal chief stowed thrones ('til one fell through the ceiling and killed him). But I guess you have to know the spoonerism version to understand that.

Ah, so he that has grouse, shouldn't throw stones. Otherwise they might drop the bird he has in hand trying for two in the bush.

drakaan:

Except simplicity isn't the issue (that's the reason the graphic designers use tables...they're easier to understand).

The issues are appropriateness, semantics, and how you decouple layout from content. Your simple table won't look great on my blackberry...or in lynx, although it may be fine in your browser.

That aside, your desired layout can be accomplished with 3 appropriately-classed/identified divs and a little bit of CSS.

And, of course, the browser can cache the stylesheet, so you save bandwidth.

Wait...you weren't just trolling, were you?

When I had a Blackberry, Wikipedia's habit of using CSS to arrange the page made it very difficult to use. Did you know that the "Search" entry box (you know, the one on the left near the top) is one of the very last elements in the HTML. For a long while, the BB browser did not fetch style sheets, meaning that I had to wheel through the entire (long, long, long) page to search for something.

Me:

He tried to use Dreamweaver to -fix- code? Well, that'd be his first web development lesson learnt!

We call it "Dreamcleaver" for a reason.

No, it's "cleavage dream".

After my complaining about yesterday's post, I wanted to just say thank-you for today's post. Not much creative fluff, just good old-fashioned WTFery. Thank you, Alex. This is why I read this site.

Readers may be interested to know:

1) thedailywtf.com uses tables for layout (of non-tabular data).

2) The W3C validator currently reports 580 Errors, 264 warning(s) on the page containing this article.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the website I had to rework was 'professionally designed' but it was a similar WFT of fixed width nested tables.

It was for a local club.

I just wiped the whole thing and put up a quick WordPress site.

Done.

They still haven't figured out that people can post to it instead of going through a 'webmaster'. Luckily that's not me. Unluckily it's my husband so I still have to hear about it.

Steve the Cynic:

When I had a Blackberry, Wikipedia's habit of using CSS to arrange the page made it very difficult to use. Did you know that the "Search" entry box (you know, the one on the left near the top) is one of the very last elements in the HTML. For a long while, the BB browser did not fetch style sheets, meaning that I had to wheel through the entire (long, long, long) page to search for something.

That's what you get for browsing the internet on a blackberry. It's a phone...

anon:

TarquinWJ:

Grass house throwing stones...

Grass house? It's *glass* house.

People who live in grass houses shouldn't throw molotov cocktails.

Good one.

TarquinWJ:

Even this site uses some layout tables, as well as deeply nested div tag soup. Grass house throwing stones...

lets see... just a random inspect... WTF!?!

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   <table>

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       <td>

         <div>

           Comment text

         </div>

       </td>

     </tr>

   </table>

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There's a completely unneeded table in every comment!!!!!

I won't even get to the number of errors returned by html validator...

MrsPost:

They still haven't figured out that people can post to it instead of going through a 'webmaster'. Luckily that's not me. Unluckily it's my husband so I still have to hear about it.

So instead of posting like they're post to, they email Mr. Post?

[quote="Alex Papadimoulis"]As for Matt, his first assignment was to tweak the layout so that it would work at other resolutions. And to do so without tearing up too much of the warped HTML code that the company had paid so much for.[/quote]

TRWTF is that second sentence right there. The fact that they paid $20k for it does not make it more valuable than if they had gotten it for free. Don't throw good money (or time) after bad.

dkf:

21152691 by 889038291? Nearly 19 quadrillion cells?

You didn't take into account there were most certainly a few million colspan and rowspan tags sprinkled about that mess. It might bring it down to 12 or 13 quadrillion cells.