Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"From my humble point of view, the IT industry is not one industry, but a relationship of connected industries." -- dacuteturtle, who then starts describing the list here.

Argh. I've got a site I was supposed to make several "small" modifications to by yesterday. Unfortunately the code is so brittle that the tiniest change I make -- substituting one graphic for another or adding a paragraph -- severely hoses the layout. So first I spend forever wading through table code trying to figure out what goes where so I can determine where my changes are supposed to be, and then I spend forever figuring out why my one wee change broke the page. We're talking about 1600 lines of HTML (fortunately indented a bit more consistently than the last site I had to modify, but that 1600 lines is just the first file I had to touch, and there's no use of comments and whitespace to make it any easier to tell what's logically a part of what).

Is it just me, or should web pages not be so brittle that if you touch them they shatter?

A few lines out of the few screenfulls of messages HTML Tidy spewed when I asked it to fix the indenting on that 1600-line, 60K HTML file I mentioned in my previous entry:

After a loooong list of warning/error messages...

293 warnings, 13 errors were found! Not all warnings/errors were shown.

This document has errors that must be fixed before
using HTML Tidy to generate a tidied up version.

Unescaped &s, tags in illegal places, closing tags in the wrong order, missing </form> ... and this is somebody's professional code for somebody else's active commercial site?