I haven’t been working much on my site lately. A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me to set up a Myspace page for his Blues band. He doesn’t know HTML but I do, and I was happy to help, but damn that was a painful experience. Myspace looks like it was designed by a band of retarded, crack-addicted monkeys flinging poo at each other while they built it. The user interface is clumsy and stupid (enter styles in the same field as the content? Are you kidding me?), the HTML is just so 1997, with no Doctype, half-assed, inconsistent use of Cascading Style Sheets, generous use of non-breaking spaces to force layout, tables (natürlich) and various other easily-avoided annoyances. But, the best part: you can’t store the pound sign. That’s right, any instance of “#” in any field, including the stylesheet, just disappears. That means you can forget about proper typography. And forget about styling elements with unique ID’s, of which there are a few. I guess those particular bits were either never tested, or the powers that be didn’t care enough.
Which is still not as crazy as that one evening where all instances of the letter “i” (upper- or lowercase) were converted to double periods “..”. Ser..ously. Every..th..ng was look..ng l..ke th..s. At f..rst .. couldn’t bel..eve ..t, .. was sure ..t was a bad dream. It’s a good thing I’d backed everything up. I sent in a bug report, but it was fixed by the next morning. Or it just fixed itself. Or maybe it really was a bad dream, for all I know.
Okay, enough venting. Honestly, after a while I started to see it as an interesting challenge, and I’m happy to see how well the site turned out. Not as pretty as I would have liked, maybe, but it’s nice and clean and does the job, and (more importantly) the Piggies are happy with it. Now that I’ve looked around, it turns out I can style things even better, but that can wait. I should probably focus on my own site for a while.