06-16-2003, 06:11 AM
Well, looks like a perfect oppertunity to hijack this thread and go on a tangent.
Lots of months back, when I was actually still in the "web design" business with a pal, we had this one client whose old website still brings agony to my mind whenever I think about it. I don't know who the old webmaster was for this poor soul, but by the end of the first day, I was ready to smash his hands with a sledge hammer so that he may never use another set of keyboard and mouse ever again.
It begun innocently enough with a single zip file and a "here, optimize this" over MSN Messenger. Upon opening the htm files contained within with FrontPage, however, I noticed something very strange: they were blank. Yes, I was actually working on FrontPage. However, the only two reasons were that I could quickly preview the page without changing windows and that the servers I would be uploading to had FrontPage extension.
After trying a few re-opens without success, I then loaded up my trust Notepad to check out this "blank page" problem. What I found was a mess so hidious, so impossibly mangled that it made my computer desk look like a library in comparison. After a few more minutes of playing around with FrontPage, I concluded the following: the code was so horribly messed up that when FrontPage tries to do an "automatic code optimization" it ends up deleting half of the entire document, and all of the content. Oh, and you'd never guess what I found looking at the files in notepad.
As if just a few pages weren't bad enough, almost every single .htm file I received had the same problem. To add to the agony, the website is for that of a "specialized" computer dealer, and there was separate pages for each rig and product our client sold.
Long story short, I ended up redoing most of the pages by hand from scratch. Amazing how the introduction of just one thinking brain into the FrontPage/web-master system can reduce the average file-size more than 70%. You know what else is great? The pages actually load now.
Lots of months back, when I was actually still in the "web design" business with a pal, we had this one client whose old website still brings agony to my mind whenever I think about it. I don't know who the old webmaster was for this poor soul, but by the end of the first day, I was ready to smash his hands with a sledge hammer so that he may never use another set of keyboard and mouse ever again.
It begun innocently enough with a single zip file and a "here, optimize this" over MSN Messenger. Upon opening the htm files contained within with FrontPage, however, I noticed something very strange: they were blank. Yes, I was actually working on FrontPage. However, the only two reasons were that I could quickly preview the page without changing windows and that the servers I would be uploading to had FrontPage extension.
After trying a few re-opens without success, I then loaded up my trust Notepad to check out this "blank page" problem. What I found was a mess so hidious, so impossibly mangled that it made my computer desk look like a library in comparison. After a few more minutes of playing around with FrontPage, I concluded the following: the code was so horribly messed up that when FrontPage tries to do an "automatic code optimization" it ends up deleting half of the entire document, and all of the content. Oh, and you'd never guess what I found looking at the files in notepad.
Quote:<META content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0" name=GENERATOR>
As if just a few pages weren't bad enough, almost every single .htm file I received had the same problem. To add to the agony, the website is for that of a "specialized" computer dealer, and there was separate pages for each rig and product our client sold.
Long story short, I ended up redoing most of the pages by hand from scratch. Amazing how the introduction of just one thinking brain into the FrontPage/web-master system can reduce the average file-size more than 70%. You know what else is great? The pages actually load now.