The blog post for today is my ramblings about common mistakes that novice web-developers make during their first steps in programming.
Just for fun. They:
- Use W3Schools as a primary source for programming knowledge and do not question a single line of code they find there. (“W3C is a mystery world which I should learn to comply to“).
- Scorn unobtrusive JavaScript.
- The first book on web-development they ever read is a mid-90’s apocryphal issue claiming that JavaScript is not a programming language. A claim they embrace and use as an excuse not to learn JavaScript.
- Find it amazing to overuse animated gifs that poorly anti-alias with the background of the page.
- Extensively use frames and iframes without any obvious reason or for positioning purposes.
- Play with the DOCTYPE of the page (“What will happen if I use XHTML3.1 for my website?“) or simply dismiss it.
- Add an XML prologue before the DOCTYPE just because they saw someone else doing it.
- Rely heavily on the miracle of the absolute positioning, and in a month realize the gritty truth that their work looks different and in most cases unrecognizably broken on different screen resolutions.
- Put a 25 megabytes of a lousy <bgsound />, that is blocking the entire website while being downloaded.
- Don’t pay even the slightest attention to the word “cascading” in CSS.
- Overload the website with tons of crappy ready-made JavaScript found over the Internet (title bar and status bar scrollers, marquees, etc).
- Use JavaScript in order to achieve effects that are usually achievable with CSS.
- Put a greeting message in a JavaScript alert(“”) on page load, which scares even them each time the page is loaded.
- Wonder why their PHP code is not executed when the page is open from the local file system. Later they find that they can run their very own web-server.
- Use 10+ different fonts (5 of which are totally exotic and only they and other 10 guys are the only persons in the world who have them installed) and a color-scheme that is causing nausea and nosebleed to visitors.
- Don’t test with other browsers except their default one and are sincerely surprised that their new website looks crappy in Opera.
- Use vendor proprietary JavaScript or CSS without providing solution for other browsers.
- Use <br /> and for layout purposes.
- Use inline styles.
- Force certain style rules with !important instead of making use of the cascade in their styles.
- Implement feedback forms without a server processing script and wonder why they don’t work. Do you remember action=”mailto:john@johndoe.com”?
- Consider semantics, usability, accessibility and valid code useless stuff that they shouldn’t care of.
- Use deprecated tags like <center />.
- Start learning PHP or other server-side language before HTML.
- Hard-code everything that should not be hard-coded.
- Don’t care about encoding.
Do these facts sound familiar? Do you remember making at least 5 of these mistakes as a novice programmer?