Funny Work Stories December 5th, 2007

Funny story from work: So a client had their website redesigned (after my redesign which got royally messed up by how many navigation buttons they wanted stick on) and they chose a different company to do it. The design looks good and does a great job of capturing the problematic navigation that killed my design. But as clients are wont, they decided to flip some colors around and add another button (obviously this client is predisposed to add buttons). The client didn’t want to use the original designer for whatever reason and decided to use us (again). The color switching and adding the new button went really well after we bought the missing font that the original designer had used. Anyway the images were fine and dandy. And this is now where the story gets funny. I’m looking at the HTML and CSS and find that there are a bjillion different stylesheets. Each page in the site has its own 2 stylesheets. Mind boggling crazy it becomes funny. But that’s not the worst of it. I drop in the images into the proper folder(s – don’t get me started on how they organized the file structure) and open up the appropriate style sheets to make some text color changes appropriate to the image color changes I’ve made. To make sure that I edit the correct style I also open up one of the html files – and I spot a <p class=”heading”>. I think, huh, that’s interesting, because generally one uses an <h> tag for headings…And as I look over the HTML code and the CSS I start to laugh as it becomes clear no <h> tags were used throughout the entire page! Although to be honest I didn’t search that hard. There’s nothing wrong with <p class=”heading”> but when it’s being used to replace an <h> tag, it’s not semantic or appropriate! That and the various non-breaking space code that littered the page made me laugh. Someone new to CSS perhaps?