What a Mess!!!
While doing some research into various parts that I'll need to upgrade my computer, I stumbled across this rather odd looking page. Lian-Li, one of the best computer case manufacturers, made a complete mess of the CSS on their reviews page. Basically, much of the text was unreadable. Why? Because entire blocks of text were completely overlapping other blocks of text.
Looking into this further, although CSS was used, the page has been flooded with not less than 296 opening, and 289 closing <font> tags! hmmm… I wonder why those figures don't match? Many of these have up to 10 or more levels of nesting <font> tags within <font> tags; filling a document that has not less than 26 pages of source code for only 6 pages worth of acual content.
Of course, like any sensible web developer, I use a standards compliant web browser (eg. Mozilla) most of the time, avoiding Internet Explorer like the plague. The CSS seems to work in IE's buggy implementation, however the fault is infact with the author, not Mozilla. Fortunately, in this case, the ability to disable stylesheets using Chris Pederick's Web Developer toolbar allows the page to be read.
From what I can tell, the site was only tested in Internet Explorer by the author (partly because of the fact that the external stylesheet is in a file called "ie.css"). AFAICT, the charset of the HTML file has been specified as windows-1252, which suggests that a poor Microsoft editor was used. As to what causes the overlap of the text, I cannot determine that. It's most likely a combination of factors, not the least being the 368 errors within the document. Whatever the reason, one thing is for sure… The page in question was written by a a complete twit!
Comments: