Validation - poor results

This is no surprise but it still makes me sad.

This tends to tie in with my gloomy blog post a few weeks back. Standards are never really going to firmed up it's simply impossible when you have devises that allow sloppy coding and when that sloppy coding does tend to work from the end users perspective.

Think how those of feel that really tried to adhere to the standards and promote them such as they are over the last 10 years or so, those of us that were seduced by the false promises of (X)HTML waiting years for v.2

Of course we will go on writing well formed valid markup and sod the rest of the development world, but consider this:

You are required to work with something like Wordpres MU along with the BuddyPress social networking plugin, what you find though is an utter mess of bad markup poorly thought through markup, a stylesheet structure that is IMPOSSIBLE to really keep control of as it has gone too far down a really bad inheritence/cascade path.

Even if one started to try and clean things up it would be a never ending task, too many diverse plugins required all attempting to add styles and markup produced by people that really don't have a good grasp of frontend disiplines.

The biggest issue here for me is that something like WP & BP as an example WILL become increasingly popular, and if one examines the BP plugin it's a huge feat of backend coding, complex and comprising almost as many files as WP itself if mot more? it's template structure is arcane and takes time to fathom, so all in all one would have to say written by someone with pretty advanced backend programming skills yet! why is it that these types have no care for what they output? backend scripters should be shut in a room and never allowed to mix with real people until they have learnt the required social graces of the frontend world.

Seriously I actually find these scripters offensive in their blind arrogance that outputting data is apparently not worth real consideration, but they would throw an absolute fit if I didn't follow C convention in my function syntax or god forbid chopped and changed, not that it affects the results of the script one little bit.

They really piss me off. It may be possible, maybe, if front-enders were gathered into a group with some, what, power? and boycotted all the sh*t that's pouring out of these bloataceous cetaeous back-end-thought-out steaming piles. A lot of them seem rather Javalicious. : (

Although they're nowhere near any sort of goal like that, there is a "guild of front-enders" in the Netherlands called "Fronteers" started by ppk (of quirksmode.org). There's gotta be something similar in the UK. If we had enough clout, we could possibly change these steaming piles into something that doesn't stink so badly.

*whew I think that's enough optimism from me today. I don't believe we will ever win, the sh*t will prevail, the code will always be steaming piles and the best we can hope for are more whiny disabled people engaging in more of those frivolous lawsuits which possibly is the only REAL way to ensure some amount of code integrity (since good code is always easier to remain accessible than crap code). *ps don't think the above are my words... this is how people are described when they find they need to resort to the law to fix code.

I see on the front page that Facebook has gotten a 600% more popular or something? That steaming pile of js-reliant garbage is, I swear, going to collapse under the weight of all the wasteful bandwidth it's using just to run all the garbage.

Oh and it thinks Konqueror is a mobile phone. Retards.

A long way to go? I don't view it that way. It may sound selfish but I'm comfortable about where I am in terms of understanding and experience of front-end code and don't feel like I have any obligation (or inclination) to preach any messages these days.

Hmmm...can't look it up now but Gary posted on the blog some time ago about a survey that said most people who used screen readers were quite happy with what they got

Tyssen - perfectly understandable point of view but I can also side with Hugo's first couple of paragraphs. When we see so many questions here that indicate even developers with some experience either aren't aware of the validator or don't care enough to use it to produce stable, solid websites Opera's results are disappointing but not unexpected.

One of the problems I guess is the age old promotion of "anybody can do it" never taking into account that - like anything - to produce good work demands effort. Something I've no doubt you've put in. Though I've always thought you were so laid back as to be almost horizontal about things the rest of us get a bit steamed up about...and I actually have no right to!!! I was just a bit surprised I guess that the results were soooo bad.

A long way to go? I don't view it that way. It may sound selfish but I'm comfortable about where I am in terms of understanding and experience of front-end code and don't feel like I have any obligation (or inclination) to preach any messages these days.

With respect Tyssen that slightly misses the point, it isn't about you and how you feel, I'm happy for you and your level of comfort it's more about the general state of affairs. Great if that doesn't affect one and one can chug along happily with decent clients; I too don't feel the need to preach any longer but more due to it simply being wasted effort.

The biggest problem that I see with these OS projects is that they can tend not to be that well structured when it comes to the various areas of discipline it's clear that there needs to be some control over the WPMU/BP project before things go too far, a check needs to be kept on how plugin code is written (even though there is a necessary methodology that has to be adhered to it can still tend to allow the author to do bad stuff) Classes and the markup outputted needs to be carefully structured and follow very strict conventions. I can of course start hacking every plugin I have to use but it's time wasted, I can and have to attempt to hack core files but that is a very bad practise to get into.

<NavinJohnson>Sir, you are talking to a backend scripter!</NavinJohnson>
Actually, I don't consider myself a scripter. More of an actual programmer.

Your point rings true though. I had it with trying to make an open source CMS form proper output and just wrote my own. The most work I have to do now is to move the navigation and drop in a new CSS file.

It's an interesting distinction that of Scripter Vs Programmer When I started out the distinction was that a programmer wrote code that required compiling to run as a standalone app, a true programme as it were, whereas a scripter or scripting was a language that required a parser to function and was not a true programming language; or something along those lines. It's interesting - as I have encountered - the number of web dev backend scripters who adamantly claim they are indeed programmers.

I'm not really knocking backend guys but do wish they would take some time out to appreciate the area they are working in and that it doesn't end with their call to a DB and foreach loop they write or would they please adhere to a very strict MVC approach.

By my definition, that is accurate.

I hope I'm not overstating my abilities.

I am a bit new to the MVC approach but it sure makes a whole lot of sense.

I'm a bit more liberal with my definition of programming languages. If there is some form of if-then-else, and some way to loop, it's a programming language. It all comes down to decisions and branching; it matters not whether it's compiled or interpreted.

My biggest gripe with back-end (more correctly mid-tier) programmers is that they don't separate the programming logic from the html structure. The two are woven together so that one can't be changed without requiring the other to go through modification. Ideally, the logic should be a black box to the structure, the html template, and vice versa.

cheers,

gary

Exactly, a strict and utterly vital adherence to MVC.

I naturally realise that there is thought and patterns applied to the development of apps such as WPMU & BuddyPress otherwise things would simply fall apart it's the fact that all too often I find I have to delve into files that I shouldn't be concerned with where I'm simply attempting to control output or worse trying to control logic becomes such a feat of endurance trying to fathom the file/function/templating paths and structure.

More and more I realise the absolute prime necessity of documenting and documenting as one goes not as an afterthought or simply left to phpdocs (as useful and important as that is) but I'm wittering away here and ought to stop

They're the loudest disabled but not the only. And you should go hear them at places like Web Visum. The web is a steaming pile and people come against barriers every day. They've just learned to live with it, ask non-disabled people to help (which is really annoying), and anything that's remotely better is automatically jawsome.

People are happy with the stuff that does work, of course.

Re programming vs scripting: so what is it when a language is both interpreted and has compiled parts? Lawlz it's a MUTANT oh noes it will eat us lawlz

"so what is it when a language is both interpreted and has compiled parts"

Bloody confusing!

I suppose. Programming and scripting languages are usually pretty well defined and I imagine the distinction is between the proper use of either. There is a difference between "script knitters" and programmers that use scripting languages. There are plenty of script knitters that happen to use programming languages as well.

I completely agree.

Like Perl. It has both a compiling stage (and with something like mod_perl modules are basically compiled at the start) but it also is interpreted (evaluates the context around the code each time it's executed, and can be modified as it's executed).
Python does too though other than something called "freezing" I'm not too familiar with what exactly Python does. But they are considered interpreted languages, and they have compiled parts (such as modules) and other pre-compiled bits if you want them.

So if you write Perl or Python, are you a programmer or a scripter? I don't suppose it matters.

It makes me feel special. OK?

A scriptammer. Progripter.