Before I begin this mutinous rant, I'm going to make one (…er, probably more than this) thing clear: I'm not one for talking about others' sites. This might stem from a number of things, a) because I feel my own site is probably lacking in more ways than one (i.e. who am I to bitch?) or b) because I also feel it's a dead cause. Unless we web designers (/web reviewers) sugar coat the truth until it's plain-out lying-your-ass-off, the shitty website owner is right and we are wrong. But I digress…

Despite <a href="http://jemjabella.co.uk" title="External Link: jemjabella.co.uk">Jem »</a> consistently touching on these issues, it never occurred to me how shitty a person's website could be until you actually <em>pay attention</em> to the coding at hand. Example: I'm helping a friend out<a href="#note-1">¹</a>, and I come across their <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheet">CSS</abbr>, which is the cause of their problem. Their #container DIV isn't aligning the right way. Of course, this leads me to investigate further, and I realize something: their coding is <em>fucking</em> atrocious! (insert a billion explanation points here) I haven't been living in the old ages where iframes and nonexistent Doctypes still live, yet somehow it never occurred to me how badly someone can code.

Isn't that what most (worth-their-salt) reviewers have been saying all along? Your coding is horrible, what makes you think you're website isn't? Isn't that the basis of most people's problems? No Doctype (and Doctype confusion, such as closing line breaks, but not images), terrible <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheet">CSS</abbr>, scrollbar styles that only work in two<a href="#note-2">²</a> browsers?

It opened my already slitted eyes. I realize my coding isn't the nicest to look at (especially the font styles, I'm terrible when it comes to them), but I <em>know</em> that my coding isn't bad, nor does it ruin every browser in the Internet world. So as a end to this little rant of mine, I want to give a little advice: if your <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheet">CSS</abbr> ruins itself in <em>Firefox</em> (or <em>Opera</em>, we'll include that beast in there for good measure), your coding sucks. No, wait, let me rephrase that: if your <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheet">CSS</abbr> sucks (much less your <abbr title="Hyper Text Markup Language">HTML</abbr>!), your site sucks. Just because your <a href="http://dubious.nu/wp/2008/online/validation-isnt-everything/" title="External Link: 'Validation Isn't Everything' article at dubious.nu">validator ticks true »</a> and your site looks decent in Firefox, doesn't mean that your coding is fine, much less correct. For those who give a rats ass, and I know a good percent of web <del>designers</del> don't care about their coding, at least try to make it better. Just because you want to copy the next best graphic designer, doesn't mean your coding has to be as shitty as theirs.

<ol>
<li id="note-1" class="smallNote">"Friend" is an <em>example</em>. Not one person is being targeted specifically (you're not that special).</li>
<li id="note-2" class="smallNote">Correct me if I'm wrong; I deleted most browsers from my computer, and I'm too lazy to check elsewhere, therefore I'm sure I'm 99% wrong on this.</li>
</ol>