Forum Moderators: open
Had a rush job from a client to set up a CMS with some sample pages yesterday... "our designers [apparently one of the top web design firms in client's country] will send you the templates / pages"... What I got was a series of pages which had evidently been created in a wyswiyg editor dating from ca. 2002 or so... Either that or they were being paid by the amount of <td> tags created... Tables within tables within tables, sometimes used just for spacing. And muggins here has to parse the through the whole mess (no indentation or anything) to extrapolate something that can be used as a template. While I'm not averse to using the odd table or two for pragmatic layouting, this gave me a whopping (real) headache just working out where I could safely cut into the layout. Aaargh.
(Still, looks like they'll let me rework the layout into something reasonable, all on billable time ;-)
What I got was a series of pages which had evidently been created in a wyswiyg editor dating from ca. 2002 or so... Either that or they were being paid by the amount of <td> tags created... Tables within tables within tables, sometimes used just for spacing. And muggins here has to parse the through the whole mess (no indentation or anything) to extrapolate something that can be used as a template.
get html tidy and you can have some cleaned/formatted code seconds after you open a document...
get html tidy and you can have some cleaned/formatted code seconds after you open a document...
doh... (slaps forehead) why didn't I think of that. Thanks. That helps somewhat, although I still have to go through the document tree and work out where it's safe to cut out content...
That helps somewhat, although I still have to go through the document tree and work out where it's safe to cut out content...
in that case you might find Mozilla's DOM Inspector [mozilla.org] to be useful as well as Web Developer 1.1.4
This is important because if you just assume the project and take on the fix, it leads to clients abusing you. They need to be made aware of how much more it's costing them in time and money.
Normally I would protest loudly and request that the client have serious words with the designers, but it was a rush job and there was no time. Fortunately it's fairly lucrative work ;-), and I think the client won't be using those designers again.
