Flashes of Panic

I did, let me confess, my share of web coding in the late ’90s. I created pages thick with tables and sliced images which needed to be arranged “just so” on the page in order to butt together and make a design element.

It’s payback time, apparently.

One of our sites, designed before my time here, has a godawful javascript rollover-click-whatever navigation menu on the left. It’s an accessibility disaster, it’s a bandwidth monstrosity (a typical page of this site is 89 KB, of which less than 3 KB is actual content: the rest is the scripts and layout tables for this menu, and that’s not counting all the images,) and what’s more, it has stopped working in many if not most modern browsers. It’s a low-priority site for us, and there are other ways to get around, so we’ve let it fester for a while.

Today I started deconstructing the whole thing in an effort to, not redesign the site, but create a lightweight standards-compliant version which looks pretty much the same (ugly as it may be, it’s a design, and I’m poorly equipped for that,) but actually works.

As I pick through the old code, pulling stuff out to recreate in some sort of valid markup, I find myself wanting to call the original developer, maybe once every five minutes, and ask what on earth they were thinking when they did that. (The answer, I suspect, is that they weren’t thinking; they were letting Dreamweaver and/or ImageReady think for them, which is not always a good choice.) I am finding large graphics cut into four or more segments for no apparent reason (which then need to be re-joined), gratuitous image-maps, and multiple discontinuous design elements merged in a single block of graphic-file (which is then, of course, sliced into a number of smaller files for no apparent reason at random places.)

The only thing that keeps me parsing this stuff out is the idea of how much better it will be when I’m done. And the queasy recollection, like a hung-over morning, that I may have contributed to equally painful layouts.

Now Playing: Keep Happy from SXSW 2005 Showcasing Artist by Papa Mali