Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

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?

In the past I've dictated the layout of web pages very little. I used tables on a few pages on my site, but for most of what I've created, I just let the content flow from top to bottom using default-color text on default-color background and exercising control mostly in the form of simple <P> and <H#> tags and the ALIGN clause in my <IMG> tags. (I think I did something table-wise in the standard headers/footers that get included on my pages too. I'd have to go look.) These are pages somebody else designed, and there are nested tables (and frames, in that other site) to dictate the layout. A reasonably readable layout, I admit, but boy what a pain to tweak the code for.

A few comments would go a long way.

Now that I finally know CSS (as of about a week and a half ago), I'm really looking forward to the day when we can reliably do all this with stylesheets instead of tables (right now too many browsers break (for some value of "break") if you try to do that). A CSS2 solution is so much more readable and maintainable (despite having to look in two different files to work on a page). In the meantime, I'm going to start writing using stylesheets in such a way that where they break, the failure just changes the layout to something else attractive and readable rather than breaking the layout. But I can't do that where someone else says, "It has to look this way everywhere," -- no, not Exact Alignments Of Stuff a la PDF, but "navbar is a vertical list on the left" type of stuff -- and it doesn't help when I'm handed an existing page that's already a tangled nest of tables and told "replace this bit here and and a banner there".