The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

C4I_Officer · 2009-06-21 Reply Admin

Heh this reminds me of the web dev company I once almost worked for. They had solved all of the IE, HTML and Javascript problems by making "websites" in pure Flash.

NOW HOW 1337 IS THAT?

2009-06-22 Reply Admin

Yawn, Matt better start getting used to being a developer.

2009-06-22 Reply Admin

acsi:
Chris:
GalacticCowboy:
Calm Mint:
...on the other nine billion computers on the planet.

Hmm.. According to my math, that's 1.5 computers for each living human on the face of the earth. Given that my family's ratio is currently 1:1 (5 people, 5 computers), somebody owes us a couple more. I'll have to store that stat for next time my wife complains we have too many computers...
I have 4 computers (router, game rig / workstation, laptop, media PC). I also have a G1 (Google Android phone), which is very much a computer. So, I have 5 computers just in my apartment right now, any of which might access content on any given website.

Plus, I am also in charge of around 12 servers spread over a couple data centers (and yes, I use links2 on them occasionally). Not every "computer" is a personal computer that you sit down and use with a Windows/Mac/KDE/Gnome GUI.

I have like 7 at home, not counting routers (1) or gaming consoles (3). Or my android (1). Or the machines I get to play with at work (1 workstation and a myriad of servers I cant keep track of without my nice list at work, mostly because they change every other week). ;)

How usefull!

2009-06-22 Reply Admin

fourchan:
A simple javascript to detect IE6 and resize the window to 800x600 would have solved the issue.
Learn to deal!

And that's why I use NoScript... so that morons can't run code on my computer.

Mel · 2009-06-22 Reply Admin

Wizard Stan:
The problem with its vs it's is that it runs afoul of the plural/possessive rule. Your brain tries to write a possessive "it", and remembers the rule "for plurals, just add the S; for possessive, add apostrophe S". This rule was drilled into me (and possibly everyone else) back in grade school. Kinda like "i before e except after c". There's more to both rules, of course, but by the time you get to the exceptions, these rules have been ingrained so deeply in your mind that it's hard to change them, especially in casual writing. It's made especially difficult by the fact that "it's" and "its" sound the exact same. We write "his" not "hims" because we say "his". I am willing to bet there are some people out there that write "her's" as well for the exact same reason: the mind knows a rule but has forgotten the exceptions. TRWTF is the education system for teaching these "rules"?

Someone's listening to you about the 'i before e' thing... :)

2009-06-22 Reply Admin

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

Learn to deal!

WTF do you think I actually did? I uncommented a javascript line that detected browser versions and called different nav scripts and walked away - and the orignal problem was specifically that the site always rendered at 800X600 and anything else broke the "only" nav script.

2009-06-22 Reply Admin

In the beginning there was HTML and people who hated style loved it. Grotesquely ugly pages of glaring text assaulted the world and all was good.

Then people with style and design sense started using tables to make their pages not look like poo and this angered the people with no design sense. They were then forced to put thought into displaying their information, they couldn't just regurgitate it onto the page.

So! The evil anti-design people created CSS and told the designers they should use that... except they didn't bother to ask anyone with any sense and so the new "functionalaity" was less functional than the old, working tables.

Heck the terrible new system couldn't even do vertically centering! And that made the inventors happy again as their true intention was to destroy the ability for designers to make pages look nice.

That's when designers stopped listening to a-holes that come up with standards that don't actually address their needs and were only created to STOP them from doing what they want.

Oh, and that's why this guy put in 700 tables. Some jerks at WC3 didn't think he should actually have any control over the look of his site but they realized they needed to PRETEND they were addressing the problems of tables.

Code Dependent · 2009-06-22 Reply Admin

Ilya Ehrenburg:
Code Dependent:
OldCoder:
Apostrophes can also indicate possession. The "filename" belonged to "it", so this usage is correct. Or at least, in OldCoder's view.
Nope. Read the cartoon again. "It's" = "it is", and only "it is". So it reads like this:
It is filename?
Not quite. Read the cartoon again. There is - it's hard to see and I overlooked it at first, too, so I thought Bob got it wrong - a side note mentioning the other expansion of it's. But "It has filename?" sounds more like lolspeak than English, only the it would be "It can haz filename?" shudder

Bob's still wrong. "It has" would be used like so: "It has got to be here somewhere..."

2009-06-23 Reply Admin

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.

Ha! We've been calling it Screamweaver for a while. Probably for the same reason.

2009-06-23 Reply Admin

assuming each row/column is empty, by my (probably slightly incorrect) calculations, there would be over 150,000 terabytes of data for just the tags. I don't know what TRWTF is exactly, but I'm pretty sure it is related to this.

2009-06-23 Reply Admin

It was definitely going to be a long way to the bottom.

FTFY

Using IE6 and 800x600 is not a problem. It used javascript, so they could have simply hacked the security and launched the browser themselves. Extra points for detecting if missing and then downloading and installing it first.

Ilya Ehrenburg · 2009-06-23 Reply Admin

Code Dependent:
Ilya Ehrenburg:
Code Dependent:
OldCoder:
Apostrophes can also indicate possession. The "filename" belonged to "it", so this usage is correct. Or at least, in OldCoder's view.
Nope. Read the cartoon again. "It's" = "it is", and only "it is". So it reads like this:
It is filename?
Not quite. Read the cartoon again. There is - it's hard to see and I overlooked it at first, too, so I thought Bob got it wrong - a side note mentioning the other expansion of it's. But "It has filename?" sounds more like lolspeak than English, only the it would be "It can haz filename?" shudder
Bob's still wrong. "It has" would be used like so: "It has got to be here somewhere..."

Are you saying that abbreviating "it has" to "it's" is wrong? That would surprise me. "It's got to be..." or "It's been a long time since..." are so commonplace, if it were wrong, I'd expect to have read some rants about it. Also, my dictionaries say it's a contraction of "it is" or "it has", so it seems to be official.

Code Dependent · 2009-06-23 Reply Admin

Ilya Ehrenburg:
Code Dependent:
Bob's still wrong. "It has" would be used like so: "It has got to be here somewhere..."
Are you saying that abbreviating "it has" to "it's" is wrong?

No, I'm saying "it's" as a contraction of "it has" is right. However, it still doesn't indicate possession. As noted above, "it's" as a contraction of "it has" would be used as in, "It's been a long time", not as in "What has it got in its pockets", which has no apostrophe.

Ilya Ehrenburg · 2009-06-23 Reply Admin

Code Dependent:
Ilya Ehrenburg:
Code Dependent:
Bob's still wrong. "It has" would be used like so: "It has got to be here somewhere..."
Are you saying that abbreviating "it has" to "it's" is wrong?
No, I'm saying "it's" as a contraction of "it has" is right. However, it still doesn't indicate possession. As noted above, "it's" as a contraction of "it has" would be used as in, "It's been a long time", not as in "What has it got in its pockets", which has no apostrophe.

Ah, just a misunderstanding, then. I was referring to Bob the angry flower, not OldCoder who may or may not be called Bob. He (flower) has a big "IT'S = IT IS That's it, Folks...", and a small asterisk (*or it has). I first overlooked the asterisk, so I thought he missed it. He hasn't, so Bob's got it right.

By the way, thinking about it, contracting it has to it's is only done if the has is the auxiliary verb in the perfect aspect, isn't it? Contracting it in "It has a certain ring to it." sounds terribly wrong.

2009-06-23 Reply Admin

Calm Mint:
"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.

Obviously posted by someone who doesn't know javascript.

2009-06-23 Reply Admin

Wow that's weak!

equex · 2009-06-24 Reply Admin

i've read several counterpoints regarding the whole no-table-for-layouts fad. one can argue that CSS was not made to create layouts, either. Its a STYLE sheet. There is no web standard for the layout itself. Only how to represent what's in the layouts.

2009-06-24 Reply Admin

I would like to see a link to this site so we can see how well Matt did in the end.

2009-06-25 Reply Admin

The Real WTF is that he uses Dreamweaver.

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 guess you've never seen stylesheets loaded by JavaScript. I remember a guy asking me the other day about a problem he had on a site he was troubleshooting: When he loaded the page on IE, one time out of ten, a form button would disappear. The HTML was all there and whatnot, but the button wouldn't appear. When he asked me, I guessed that a JavaScript loaded stylesheet raced against another stylesheet causing the formatting error. Turned out I was correct.

2009-07-01 Reply Admin

Yep, "its" is a totally anomalous possessive form. After all, the other possessives are:

he's her's our's your's there's (British English), they're's (US English)

and last not least

my'ne

I call them the nomalous possessive forms.

2009-07-02 Reply Admin

Crabs:
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.

Sorry i'm late to the party. I've not been here for a while. I still feel a need to dispel the "I need tables for layout" myth.

how do you do that with only 3 columns?

here how to do it with 3 divs and a little css.

<html>
	<head><title>3 columns with divs</title>
	<style type="text/css">
		body
		{
			width:80%;
			margin-left:10%;
		}
		div.col
		{
			border-style: solid;
			border-width: 1px;
			border-color: #000;
			float:left;
		}
		#right
		{
			float:right;
			width:20%;
		}
		#left
		{
			width:20%;
		}
		#middle
		{
			width:58%;
			margin-left:1%;
		}
	</style>
</head>
<body>
	<div class="col" id="left">Left column</div>
	<div class="col" id="middle">Middle column</div>
	<div class="col" id="right">Right column</div>
</body>

</html>

It works best, surprisingly, in IE7. firefox and chrome mess up the right column at smaller resolutions.

2009-07-21 Reply Admin

Wouldn't the fact that it messes up in Firefox confirm, rather than dispel, the myth that one should use tables for layout?

2013-03-11 Reply Admin

notromda:
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!?!
 
   
     
       
         
           Comment text
         
       
     
   
 
There's a completely unneeded table in every comment!!!!!

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

It's been changed since then. Now it's more like:

<html>
  <body>
    <div</span> id="PrimaryOuter">
      <div</span> id="Primary">
        <div</span> id="PrimaryGlow" class="glow">
          <div</span> id="MainContent">
            <div</span> class="CommentContainer">
              
                
                  
                    
                      <div</span> class="CommentBody">
                        <div</span> class="CommentBodyText">
                          <blockquote</span> class="Quote">
                            Quoted text
                          
                          Comment text
                                                      Code text
                          
                        
                      
                    
                  
                
              
            
          
        
      
    
  </body>
</html>

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