Comment On The Great Pyramids of DIV

What is this, some kind of browser stress-test?

I scrolled too fast.  Now I feel seasick... [+o(]

what

  is

    this

          was

                  he

a

         fan

                                 
of

    e.e.          cummings?

I refuse to believe this is real. Why, WHY would someone do this? Impossible.

Has anybody considered that these could be machine-generated? I see the word "Annuity" so I instantly think of the actuaries I work with. Some genius may have written a braindead XL -> HTML converter. I will not believe that anybody would do such a thing by hand...

Anonymous:

Has anybody considered that these could be machine-generated?

That was actually one of my first thoughts, a loop gone wild! I would
fall off my chair if I was going through code and saw this.... LOL

Razzie:

I refuse to believe this is real. Why, WHY would someone do this? Impossible.

I belive it easily.  It was almost certainly produced by a WYSIWYG HTML editor.  Some element was left-aligned. Say

<table width="100%"><tr><td align="left">some text</td><tr><table>

some text

Designer want it centered, so he highlights the text (and the editor selects the entire table). Designed clickes the "center" button.  The Editor wraps the entire table in an <div align="center"> tag.

<div align="center"><table width="100%"><tr><td align="left">some text</td><tr><table></div>

Now, the table is centered, but it looks the same, because the inner text is still left-aligned.  So, designer presses "Center" a few more time.  And then gives up until the next time he edits that page.  Eventually, someone who can actually read HTML looks at the page source & finds the problem.

Maybe the original developer really, really, really wanted to make sure
the text was centered - you know, for all those browsers out there that
ignore the first 15 <div align="center"> tags...



Either that, or he was using FrontPage.

You guys are being kind.  I think this is a result of not knowing what "padding" is, relying on the default margin and padding of divs.  I once maintained an ASP application that would have great blocks of code like:

Response.Write "&nbsb;"

Response.Write "&nbsb;"

Response.Write "&nbsb;"

Response.Write "&nbsb;"

Response.Write "&nbsb;"

Response.Write "&nbsb;"

Response.Write "&nbsb;"

And on and on for 30 or so lines.  Just cause margins and padding were foriegn concepts. Yikes.

When I really want to kick up a page and I worry that something won't
be centered.  I mean if I want bump up the centering to eleven , I
just apply more "centering" thingys,  though I do like to
diversify with a heirachy of tags including spans, tables, the center
tag.... lots of stuff.

Ops.. almost puked when I saw that. Yuck! [+o(]

Aw, come on, the indentation is GORGEOUS.

Just think of all the cool CSS stuff you can do with that markup, as long as you don't mind:

div div div div div div { background: transparent url(bg-top-left.png) no-repeat scroll top left; }
div div div div div div div { background: transparent url(bg-top-right.png) no-repeat scroll top right; }

Then again, there're worse travesties of coding, such as a <center align="left"> I stumbled upon once.

But don't you see? He's encoded part of the human genome in that source!

(What? does no-one else see a double-helix there?)

The real WTF is he uses an h1, and then an h3, with no h2 in the middle...

That is the real WTF, right?

well, i made the browser window as short as possible, then when using
the mouse wheel the html was moving left and right...   just
like old ascii video games.



maybe they were bored at work and wanted a cool ascii effect?  in
which case, this is not actually a wtf perhaps.  it's actually an
easter egg for the next programmer.

Well except for the missing DTD, this is valid XHTML Transitional as far as I can tell.

I appreciate that.

Saying that it is transitional is about as meaningful to me as saying that it contains ASCII characters.

Lucky for them that IE doesn't handle DIVs like it handles TABLEs and STYLE blocks.

For some reason if you have more than 15 STYLE blocks on a page, it ignores all of them after #15 (found this when it turned out that somehow the old style block was not being replaced, but just superceded by one put after it).

Also, after about 26 TABLEs in TABLEs and content in the later tables is just uhm, removed. Gone. No render.

(Don't know if Firefox has any of those limits)

Drak

Hmm, I think this developer just wanted to be REALLY REALLY sure the div was centered!!!

I particulary like the "".

But I gotta agree, looks very pretty :)

Yeesh... this is one of those times where you resort to *ignoring* the
HTML code, having a good look at the page itself and start coding from
scratch something that recreates its look.

To all the people claiming that stuff like this has to be fake - you've
obvoiusly not spent much time in the real world - especially the world
outside of 'official developers'. Quite frankly I've seen stuff in
recent years that makes the above monstrosity look like a work of simle
genius.





The golden rule to live by when dealing with these people is "never underestimate stupidity, never overstimate competence".

christoofar:

what

  is

    this

          was

                  he

a

         fan

                                 
of

    e.e.          cummings?

Besides just being cool, the fact that this worked without the forum
barfing all over your prose is worth a faint cheer. Crazy when you come
to expect anything more than ascii text to be fraught with peril, on
such a feature-gilded board.



I see this stuff all the time. Like lone says, it's recognizable when
your browser starts dragging with every scroll; I used to check the
source to see what the hell it was, but now I just save the cringe and
weeping for things more worthy. I keep my 'highlight boxes' surfing
(special css sheet) to a minimum just because some sites look like
crazy explosions.

<% For Each Agg In Aggregates %>

Haha, having worked in the ag industry that looks so funny to me.

What about a really dumb HTML editor, that would put a div around the
selection every time the cute little icon was pressed, whether or not
one was present?

A naive user in WYSIWYT (What You See Is What You Tube) mode could have WTFd this...

Oh come on. I know it's reviled in the industry, but you guys honestly ought to know what FrontPage-generated code looks like. This is a classic example

Granted, the more recent versions of FrontPage aren't nearly so bad as to create code like this, but a long time ago when I was just learning about "this internet thing", I gave up using FrontPage because it consistantly created crap like this.

And if it ain't FrontPage, then maybe it shares a codebase somewhere? =)

Anonymous:

To all the people claiming that stuff like this has to be fake - you've obvoiusly not spent much time in the real world - especially the world outside of 'official developers'. Quite frankly I've seen stuff in recent years that makes the above monstrosity look like a work of simle genius.

The golden rule to live by when dealing with these people is "never underestimate stupidity, never overstimate competence".

I actually have a strange take on this, because I have met some people who have done this. Back in the days of the "IT gold rush" people saw there was obscene amounts of money to be made in the IT business to fix the "Y2K" bug. They didn't realise or didn't care that the Y2K problems were more or less in old mainframe programs, none of which they had a clue on, They just knew they'd be pulling 6 figure salaries as "programmers". So -- They start flooding Devry and ITT Tech. Soon you have droves of idiots out there that have a piece of paper that says they have an associates degree in information technologies. They can't code their way out of a paper bag, but do manage to bullshit their way into a cushy job. Once the .com bubble burst, they were eliminated, and nore more competent people are coming in behind them having to deal with the mess they've left behind.

Mike R:

Anonymous:

To all the people
claiming that stuff like this has to be fake - you've obvoiusly not
spent much time in the real world - especially the world outside of
'official developers'. Quite frankly I've seen stuff in recent years
that makes the above monstrosity look like a work of simle genius.

The
golden rule to live by when dealing with these people is "never
underestimate stupidity, never overstimate competence".

I actually have a strange take on this, because I have met some
people who have done this. Back in the days of the "IT gold rush"
people saw there was obscene amounts of money to be made in the IT
business to fix the "Y2K" bug. They didn't realise or didn't care that
the Y2K problems were more or less in old mainframe programs, none of
which they had a clue on, They just knew they'd be pulling 6 figure
salaries as "programmers". So -- They start flooding Devry and ITT
Tech. Soon you have droves of idiots out there that have a piece of
paper that says they have an associates degree in information
technologies. They can't code their way out of a paper bag, but do
manage to bullshit their way into a cushy job. Once the .com bubble
burst, they were eliminated, and nore more competent people are
coming in behind them having to deal with the mess they've left behind.

This is the primary reason why I was employed where I am now. 
Then again, I look back on almost all the work I've done since 2000 and
it has all been refactoring jobs since then.  Even all my work on
HIPAA could be considered that (dealing with retro refitting broken
medical billing software to be HIPAA-compliant, when it was clear in
1989-2000 that ANSIX12 4010 837/835 was going to be the standard format
for claims).



I guess for the next 8-10 years a lot of the gravy to be had out there
is for refactoring other peoples' sh**.  Thank goodness CSC,
Accenture, Tata and Wipro keep inexpensive and inexperienced workers
around to create new crap all the time; it keeps more experienced
developers employed.

By sticking with a subset html 1.0 no matter what I can confidently say
I will never do that.  HTML 1.0 presents all the information I
need, and nobody will ever accuse me of something like that.  (I
have no idea what div does, and no reason to want to find out after
looking at that)

Anonymous:

By sticking with a subset html 1.0 no matter what I can confidently say
I will never do that.  HTML 1.0 presents all the information I
need, and nobody will ever accuse me of something like that.  (I
have no idea what div does, and no reason to want to find out after
looking at that)

I would rather like to smack you, for parading your ignorance around here, like it is a positive thing!

Get the hell out.

> relying on the default margin and padding of divs.

Divs have no default margin or padding.

Anonymous:

By sticking with a subset html 1.0 no matter what I can confidently say I will never do that.  HTML 1.0 presents all the information I need, and nobody will ever accuse me of something like that.  (I have no idea what div does, and no reason to want to find out after looking at that)

FYI:  <div> is valid in both XHTML and HTML 4.01 strict

It is used for grouping blocks of elements together to apply a style to them (much like a multi-line version of <span>).

The irony of the HTML they have here it that the indentation actually makes it less readable than if all of the <div>s were on one line:

<div><div><div><div><div><div>

</div></div></div></div></div></div>

Richard, looks like my post was a WTF, there is no padding or margin for divs. 

I guess I was struck dumb\stupid by the beauty of the pyramids.

Anonymous:

Richard, looks like my post was a WTF, there is no padding or margin for divs. 

I guess I was struck dumb\stupid by the beauty of the pyramids.

It's the curse of the aggrivated mummy. The pyrimids do hold mysterious powers...

Anonymous:

To all the people claiming that stuff like this has to be fake - you've obvoiusly not spent much time in the real world - especially the world outside of 'official developers'. Quite frankly I've seen stuff in recent years that makes the above monstrosity look like a work of simle genius.

The golden rule to live by when dealing with these people is "never underestimate stupidity, never overstimate competence".

Submit it to Alex, then, I beg you! [:D]

This is strikingly similar to something I've seen at my current employer. I believe the thinking was something along the lines of: "If <blockquote> will indent a little then four of them will indent even more!"

<html>

<head>

<title>Stuff</title>

</head>

<body background="img.gif">

<blockquote>

 <blockquote>

  <blockquote>

   <blockquote>

    <p align="center"></p>

    <p>&nbsp</p>

    <!-- snip -->

   </blockquote>

  </blockquote>

 </blockquote>

</blockquote>

</body>

</html>

Actually, sadly, I see this all the time.  Its an exceptionally
common result of people using Dreamweaver for their HTML generation who
do not know how to clean up the real HTML afterwords or code in HTML in
the first place.  It was mostly a problem in version 4, but I have
seen it occur in the later v7 releases as well. 



I have actually worked on pages that (and I timed it) took more than
2.5 minutes to load (on a gh cpu) into the wysiwyg editor, and a find/replace would
crash the program. 



Anyway, if you don't know HTML apparently the solution to ensuring
everything is formatted 'center' is to select every cell in a table at
once and do 'center' - even if you only have one or two that aren't
centered, or are behaving 'odd' due to browser conflicts. 
Dreamweaver loves ensuring each and every cell is definately centered,
and does so by always adding new div tags.  I think there must be more causes in dreamweaver as it comes up so much.



If you are a codeophobe and only stick to the Wys view, what you can't see can't hurt you right?  ;)



On a similar side note I did work on someone's search page output that had more
than 2.6Mb of HTML white space because Cold Fusion (unless someone
takes 2 seconds to tell it otherwise) likes to inline every loop and
print it out including whitespace, even if its a code loop that
generates no output itself, the clear sign of that wtf is selecting and
seeing whitespace in an output file that looks like (dashes for spaces) for 8 pages:


---

------

------

------

---------

---------

------

---------

------

---

...multiplied by however many horrible times the beast looped.

I am a programmer, not a artist or web designer.  There is good
reason for that.  No matter how much HTML I learn I will more than
get by.  In fact I'm better off not knowing anything more than
simple html - the html code itself would like nice, but the results
would be a WTF to anyone with talent.   



I know my limits.  I stick with in them.  When/if I need a web page that looks nice I get help doing it.  

Anonymous:

Actually, sadly, I see this all the time.  Its an exceptionally
common result of people using Dreamweaver for their HTML generation who
do not know how to clean up the real HTML afterwords or code in HTML in
the first place.  It was mostly a problem in version 4, but I have
seen it occur in the later v7 releases as well. 

Strange, that. I've used DW since version 6 (currently using 7). I
primarily use the hand-coding (code view) for creating templates where
I can lock down certain areas of the page so "users" editing pages with
Contribute can't touch areas I don't want them to.



I do occasionally produce a quick (temporary) mockup in design view
(psuedo WYSIWYG mode) simply for it's ease and speed. I've never (ever,
ever, ever, ever, ever) seen it produce anything even close to this
deeply nested code crap. I wouldn't put the output into production, but
since they're only mockups, there's no harm, no foul. I actually find,
as WYSIWYG goes, the code is fairly clean and straightforward...it even
does a half-decent job of CSS-P generation.



(It's important to note that DW is *NOT* a WYSIWYG editor. It's "design
view" gives you an *approximation*. Users are recommended to use the
"Preview in Browser" to see what they will get. As as editor, the "code
view" is actually quite nice. Tag completion, popup/dropdown/whatever
tag insight...ex: type "div id=" and a list of all your defined id's
pops up. Type "ul class=" and a list of all defined classes pops up.
Type "#content {background-color:" and a color picker pops up...etc.)

rogthefrog:

Anonymous:

To all the people
claiming that stuff like this has to be fake - you've obvoiusly not
spent much time in the real world - especially the world outside of
'official developers'. Quite frankly I've seen stuff in recent years
that makes the above monstrosity look like a work of simle genius.

The
golden rule to live by when dealing with these people is "never
underestimate stupidity, never overstimate competence".

Submit it to Alex, then, I beg you! [:D]

I have on a couple of occasions.



http://www.thedailywtf.com/forums/23979/ShowPost.aspx



http://www.thedailywtf.com/forums/22742/ShowPost.aspx

Anonymous:

By sticking with a subset html 1.0 no matter what I can confidently say
I will never do that.  HTML 1.0 presents all the information I
need, and nobody will ever accuse me of something like that.  (I
have no idea what div does, and no reason to want to find out after
looking at that)

Ok, let's seee...no...just no.

Otac0n:

Anonymous:

By sticking with a
subset html 1.0 no matter what I can confidently say I will never do
that.  HTML 1.0 presents all the information I need, and nobody
will ever accuse me of something like that.  (I have no idea what
div does, and no reason to want to find out after looking at that)

FYI: 

is valid in both XHTML and HTML 4.01 strict

It is used for grouping blocks of elements together to apply a style to them (much like a multi-line version of ).

The irony of the HTML they have here it that the indentation actually makes it less readable than if all of the

s were on one line:

Uh, no. A <div> is a logical division on the page -- a "content
bucket", if you will. The fact that its content can be styled en masse
is a consequence of the structure of the document and CSS cascading
rules. Using <div> tags willy-nilly for styling alone is as big a
WTF as using any other data structure (tables, anyone?) for layout.



HTML (or XHTML) markup should always add meaning to the data. You can
use a <div> to create something that looks like heading text, but
it ain't a heading if it's not in an <hX> tagset.

You have a wonderful innocence about you that will make you obsolete in
no time. I appreciate the fact that you add to the ranks of those who I
don't ever have to worry about, when it comes time for my company to
choose my replacement.



I'm a programmer, an artist, and a web designer. I push my limits all
the time. It's called progress or learning or self-preservation.



I would suggest that you set your tagline to "Strive for mediocrity"

Anonymous:

You have a wonderful innocence about you that will make you obsolete in
no time. I appreciate the fact that you add to the ranks of those who I
don't ever have to worry about, when it comes time for my company to
choose my replacement.



I'm a programmer, an artist, and a web designer. I push my limits all
the time. It's called progress or learning or self-preservation.



I would suggest that you set your tagline to "Strive for mediocrity"

At whom was that aimed, might I ask?

Stan Rogers:

Anonymous:

You have a wonderful innocence about you that will make you obsolete in
no time. I appreciate the fact that you add to the ranks of those who I
don't ever have to worry about, when it comes time for my company to
choose my replacement.



I'm a programmer, an artist, and a web designer. I push my limits all
the time. It's called progress or learning or self-preservation.



I would suggest that you set your tagline to "Strive for mediocrity"

At whom was that aimed, might I ask?

I would guess our very own HTML 1.0 guru.

As
a web-page weekend warrior, even I was appalled at this... this...
travesty of code.

I figure it's from one of two sources. 
It's either from a code generator (my top pick) or from profoundly
doofus programmer. 

I remember this one guy from my
college classes.  He deliberately put all of his lines of code
in one big mass.  And people, this was with COBOL, so can you
imagine the mess it was.  I truly pitied the professors who had
to sort thru the mess to grade it.  Personally, I would have
taken points off for making it such a pain in the neck to review.

Reminds me of a project I took over. It didn't have nested divs like that. But everything was centered. At the webpage looked horrible.
The html had centers on all the divs. I took them out. Still everyything was centered. Went into the CSS... pretty much everything was centered. Took them out... Still everything was centered.

We had a an include statement, and a header.html. And of course the body had a center style on it....

tbbrick:

He deliberately put all of his lines of code in one big mass.  And people, this was with COBOL, so can you imagine the mess it was. 

Actually, COBOL code was intended to be written as one big mass, with one "sentence" immedaitely following the previous, just like a paragraph of english text.  The idea was that it should be readable prose.

JamesCurran:

Actually, COBOL code was intended to be written as one big mass, with one "sentence" immedaitely following the previous, just like a paragraph of english text.  The idea was that it should be readable prose.

Exactly. 
Well written English text uses indentations and white space to
separate one paragraph from the next.  You
have grammatical rules and symbols to make the prose readable. 
We used splats, white spaces and indentations to ID/separate
divisions, variables, & code.  My idjit classmate crammed it
all together, no indents, no white spaces, no splats with ID text. 
Most gnarly. +o(

try looking at www.joydesign.eu and then view code on the bottom frame :o ull notice 100x <center> opening, then 1 pic and a solic 100x </center>