Like everyone nowadays I have a MySpace profile. I liked the idea of being able to customize it to your own appeal. This was until I tried to write my own CSS styling for it rather than just using a code generator.
I’m good at what I do and I am very fluent in HTML, xHTML and CSS (and many other things but I’m not going there today) but when I took a look at the source it looked like something spat out by Frontpage when a 3 year old has been put in front of it. We all know Frontpage can do a bad enough job by itself but this was a whole new level of bad code.
My first issue was with nested tables. I know HTML allows you to nest tables but just because you can do something it doesn’t mean you should. Nesting tables is something which should only be done when showing some form of mathematical data which is more advanced than anything I have done up to date. It isn’t to help layout your website. Tables shouldn’t be used for layouts full stop never mind nested tables.
My next issue was with the naming of the CSS styles for instance “.orangetext15”. I know its supposed to help everyone style their MySpace, but in my personal opinion style names should describe the type of content not what part of the styling is. What would happen if you changed the colour to red? The name would be meaning less.
Another problems I came across is the lack of thought which has gone into marking up/styling the page. Major block areas have no class to apply styles to so you have to use levels of styling for instance:
table table table{background-color:#000;}
These levels are also something which I had to work out as well and whilst doing this I found that other areas have the same level of relationship which effected areas I didn’t want to style.
It didn’t stop there either the more I trawled through the code the more problems I found. The next thing I bumped into was HTML styling. This is one of the biggest websites on the internet and there still using HTML styling as an organization they have no consideration for accessibility, standards or the people trying to use the system.
Systems are supposed to be invisible to the end user there just supposed to work and help the user. This is not something MySpace does and it’s shocking considering it’s the biggest thing to come out since Google.
We live in a web 2.0 world which MySpace is supposed to be a part of. I think it has a long way to go before I would let it into the web 2.0 club