First off, a caveat – this is not a post asking for help, nor expounding on the latest and greatest software. I didn’t trash my website or blow my database away. This isn’t a heartwarming story, nor, quite frankly, a very serious one. But it is a true story. A scary story. A story of fear. A story of what can happen when you let those who don’t know, take control. This is a story to warn others what might happen to them.
This is *my* story.
A little background: I work for a company that handles bill payments for financial institutions. A few months back I was tasked with managing and maintaining the in-house website for the Customer Service Reps. Before I came on-board, they had several different eager, if over-zealous reps doing the code work. As you can probably imagine, standardization, validation, hell, even basic code structure wasn’t high on anyone’s list of priorities. Or, I have to assume, even knowledge of.
So I took over this site, and not a day goes by where I don’t curse it. It’s not a simple site. There are over 30 different sub-directories, not to mention how many sub-sub-directories and so on. There is an images directory in pretty much every sub-, and sub-sub-directory. I tend to like my images, my CSS, and my scripts all in one place.
They use frames. They use frames a LOT. They love frames. Landing on the home page, you are greeted with the typical left-side navigation, header and main content area. All in their own frame. There are links off the navigation area that load yet more frames into the main content. One page has 6 frames on it so when viewing it in the browser, there are a total of 9 different pages being loaded into 9 different frames. Oh, and it gets better my intrepid reader. I’ve seen code where someone has created two frames, one 100% of the height, the other 0% and loaded all of the content into the one frame at 100%. Why? I know not.
Someone liked Flash. Someone decided that the Customer Service Page needed Flash. It was imperative that Flash be on the page! It’s the newest technology! It’s Here! It’s NOW! So Someone on high must have commanded “BUILD ME… a MENU”. And it was done. A horizontal menu. With little triangles that glow when the text links are moused over. Why do it in Flash? BECAUSE THEY CAN.
I’ve saved the best for last though. This is the point in the story, my daring, brave and fearless reader, where you turn on all the lights and check that the doors and windows are securely locked. This…this is where it gets scary. See, I can live with frames. I can live with the chaotic navigation, the mess the directories are, the way everything is scattered to the wind. I can live with all that. It’s a challenge, but I’ve managed, and can live with it. There’s something, however, that is impossible to live with. As a web developer who tries to live by the “code is poetry” credo, to make the code make sense, nest well, and validate, this one thing is…terrifying. Horrendous. On the surface, it seems so innocent. Just three little words. What three little words can take a man such as myself and turn him into a quivering mass of jello that jumps at his own shadow? Three, simple little words. But those three little words should strike fear into every web developer out there:
“Save as HTML”
Yes, that wonderful feature found in Microsoft Word, which enables even the most noobiest of noobs to create wonderful looking webpages and scatter them to the wilds of the web, to have their ideas dance along with the electrons of the Internet, to enable them to grace us with their designs and desires to shout out “Hi! This is my first page!” in fantastic 48 point bold comic-sans MS font type, with each word a different color.
That is what these web pages are written in. Every single page.
All 1100+ of them.
It’s enough to make one weep.