html confessions
I don’t close my unordered list tags. And: I never have.
I know because of this abject laziness, it doesn’t validate, but I don’t give a flying fig, and furthermore, it doesn’t matter in the least to any browser I’ve ever seen, back to like, Mosiac Gold.
There, I said it. I feel better.
Post any true confessions of HTML coding you have in the comments below.
~jeff
July 26th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Whenever I give a quick tutorial on html to someone, say 2 -3 hours… I usually pick something important having to do with layoui and teach them how to do it incredibly incorrectly. I usually do it by opening 2 simillar but not identical files.
Later when I get a call about the problem I created for them, I never call them back.
July 26th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
Very, very clever!
July 26th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Speaking of clever, sometimes, when put into a tight spot, I say to a HTML customer “LOOK OVER THERE, BEHIND YOU!” and when they look, I jump out a window. Except sometimes there’s no window so I just fling myself head first against a wall. When that happens I like to have an excuse ready, so I say “grrr flah cooo buh guh pppt” — the immediate concussion makes speech difficult, not to mention the impared vision from blood pooling in my eye sockets.
July 26th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
Here’s a story. True story, true story.
I had a client. We’ll call him Bill. He was a no, wait, let’s call him Ted instead. So anyway, he was this guy, and he was a client of… wait, maybe it was Bill. So, Bill oh, no, this is supposed to be a false name, so Fred wanted me to teach him how to, I mean Ted. Ted’s what I was calling him. So he wanted me to teach him how to use Photoshop, and I was, like, I’m the best explainer ever! So there I was, a watermelon on each foot and a fish in each hand, no, his name wasn’t really Bill after all. That was totally someone else.
July 26th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
I’ve given up on standards and have gone back to using tables for layout. I’ve validated consistently for a few years, but it is an unnecessary headache. There are a few things that only work across everything if you leave the DOCTYPE off the file; I used to feel bad about that but now I know better.
July 26th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
Thank god I’m not the only one refusing to waste my time by closing list tags. Cripes, what fascist creeps came up with this nonsense? Next thing you know they’ll be telling us we need to type in line numbers like I did when I was 15 using a Texas Instruments computer and saving things on cassette tape.
Validate? Who cares? Does it work? That’s all that I care about. I don’t need external validation. At least, not for my web pages.
July 27th, 2006 at 6:16 am
Here’s my chance to compare Jeff to the Nazis! (See “Internet Nastiness” entry.)
Jeff, you putrescent bucket of noisome scum! The Nazis didn’t close their unordered list tags, and LOOK WHAT HAPPENED!
Wow. That was strangly invigorating! AND nonsensical!
July 27th, 2006 at 6:20 am
… and if it weren’t so goddam early in the morning, I might have realized without a moment’s thought that the entirely gratuitous “\UL” tag I stuck at the end of the previous comment wouldn’t end up getting displayed…
Because Jeff sent his HTML brown-shirts to round up all the “\UL” tags!
July 27th, 2006 at 9:20 am
Firefox is better. I use Firefox. I love Firefox. But I hate the way Firefox interprets width and alignment in CSS SO MUCH ARGH FUCK YOU MOZILLA
July 27th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
The best way to get around the legendary CSS vs HTML vs Web Standards vs Scopes Monkey Nature Nurture debate is to Use All Images. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you want to build a new web page called “MyHelloWorldWebPageDotUS”. In this case, you would want to make all words, text, letters, menus, privacy policies, FAQ’s, tables, and buy-it-now navigational control elements into hi-resolution imagery. Most important — use drop-shadows — on all graphical elements, except for the phrase “Google” which should be rendered using Photoshop filter “Fresco” followed with a hint of “Torn Edges”. Web pages which rigorously adhere to these standards will pass every single validity test.
July 27th, 2006 at 12:28 pm
It’s a clever solution, but I can do you one better: instead of using .html as your file name extension, just use .txt! That way, you can write out your whole page using a monospace font and just use tabs and spaces to get the text where you want!
July 27th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
At risk of engaging in a ceaseless game of cat-n-mouse one-up-manship (where no-one wins), I would suggest that true connoisseurs of webification then take this so-called mono-space-txt file, screen-snap-shot it, paste it into Adobe Flash Professional 8, then export as .gif — thus insuring maximumal indexibility (MI) by Google search engine.
July 27th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
And I would suggest that it would be best if that Flash image was misparsed by Illustrator, then saved as a 20% quality JPEG.
July 27th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
I don’t put “/”s at the end of img/br/hr tags. I also think not using blink tags wherever possible is a sin.
July 27th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
I hit children, and take their shoes.
July 27th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
That’s just whining. The kids in my crawlspace have never seen a shoe, although they have been bound by shoelaces.
July 27th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
Please link example pages of these great ideas.
And just to skip to the end of this bit:
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ….. they won’t believe you.
ALL:
They won’t!
http://www.phespirit.info/montypython/four_yorkshiremen.htm
July 28th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
Exactly! Go Sox!
July 28th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
If Steve Perry were alive to see this, he might.