Gotta love WYSIWYG



  • looking through the HTML of a webpage i've been tasked to upgrade (read: rebuild properly) i found this lovely snippet of HTML.

    </font></font></font></font></font></font></font></p><p><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"> 
    <br></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></p><form method="post" action="snip">
    <font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"></font></font></font></font></font></font></font><p><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext"><font class="maintext">



  • Yeah this is horrible, I guess it is made with Frontpage? Aren't there any tools to optimize such a mess? Should be easy parsing the HTML and remove redundant tags etc.



  • @gonzo said:

    Yeah this is horrible, I guess it is made with Frontpage? Aren't there any tools to optimize such a mess? Should be easy parsing the HTML and remove redundant tags etc.


    There is: HTML Tidy ( http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/ ).



  • I suggest the phenomenon be renamed to WYSIWTF



  • MY GLASSES

    THEY DO NOTHING


    It's 2006. We can put UV-filters in glass. Why can't we put a WTF-filter in em?



  • My mother is building a website using GoDaddy.com's Website Tonight service which includes a WYSIWYG editor. The code it produces is absolutely horrible and I think definately qualifies as WYSIWTF.  Here's an example (I've changed the text to protect the innocent, but the context is a quote from a book below two images):

    <P align=justify><IMG style="WIDTH: 245px; HEIGHT: 177px" height=390
    src="img1.jpg"
    width=357 wstxclass="Image"
    mainsrc="img1.jpg"
    uid="6ae6a32b-ae06-48f3-a31e-978550d7b405">&nbsp; <IMG style="WIDTH:
    237px; HEIGHT: 178px" height=367
    src="img2.jpg"
    width=317 wstxclass="Image"
    mainsrc="img2.jpg"
    uid="b8965d17-2744-4e37-a497-23ef775300ac"></P>
    <P align=right><EM><FONT face=Georgia color=#000000>"Lorem ipsum dolor
    sit amet, hac odio fringilla,<BR>ante et, lectus tempus nullam.
    Consectetuer&nbsp;<BR> sed hac, vitae dolor, velit odio.<BR>Esse urna.
    Eu erat"<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;-Sample placeholder text</FONT></EM></P>


  • My advice is to think of it as abstract art.


                  </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    </p>
    <p>
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <br>
    </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    </p>
    <form method="post" action="*snip*">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    </font>
    <p>
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">
    <font class="maintext">

    Pretty...


  • that code was a combination of Dreamweaver and Homesite i believe...

    one time, my dad was making a page using FrontPage (he just won't switch out of it) and asked me to help him with a problem. The page he had was (seemingly) very basic. A heading, and a table with an image in the left cell and text in the right cell. He showed me how it was rendering in the browser, and half of the last letter of each line was being cut off (so that a word like "form" might look like "forn" if you know what i mean). I'd never seen HTML do anything like that before and there was no obvious cause visible from the wysiwyg side of frontpage so I switched to html view. What i saw then was just amazing. The hundreds upon hundreds of lines of code - all gibberish - made the html completely and utterly impossible to do anything with. My solution to him? "Use dreamweaver like mum does!"** hehe

    i often wonder how it is that a company with as much financial and human resources as Microsoft can make such terrible products. It seriously can NOT be that hard for MS to make a program that creates clean html! really! whose idea was it to make it create so many hundreds of useless proprietary objects and tags for simple pages - and they don't even work! I think microsoft (and end users) need to realise that the Internet is not Word.


    ** i've actually successfully weaned my mother from Frontpage to Dreamweaver to pure HTML code! It's quite possible to do provided you help them set up the proper CSS file to begin with.



  • @nickf said:

    I think microsoft (and end users) need to realise that the Internet is not Word.


    Word shouldn't do it, either. 75% of the average word .doc is inane clutter.


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