Looking Back is Painful

Published 25 March 05 by Justin French, 2 comments

Ohhhhh dear. This stuff is painful. What on earth was I thinking?

It’s a twisted mix of perfectly functional (yet truly awful) procedural PHP scattered throughout a table-based HTML layout featuring inline styles galore, embedded JavaScript, and some of the most ugly pre-standards mark-up ever!

It’s got the works… Remember shit like this?

Or perhaps you were more of a fan of classes which were far too specific to ever be useful (<p class="small brown sans"> anyone?), or just plain dumb. I actually found <p class="heading-big"> in there – why didn’t I think the <h1> tag might be appropriate? Who knows.

I even had global variables like $light_brown in there, which was helpful (I didn’t have to type #DCB870 over and over), but kind of missed the point. By the time I came back a year later and edited the colour scheme, $light_brown had been set to some kind of green, so the variable name meant nothing.

In my defence, I’ll say just a few things. I was completely self taught with a background in Graphic Design for print. Any education I receives on the topic was found for free on the web, most likely written by some 15 year old kid with barely any more knowledge than myself.

At the end of the day, the thing worked, it looked good, and no body got hurt, but I’m glad that those days are well behind me.

Have you stumbled upon any of your past work and had a laugh? Care to link to any of your ugly, bloated, illogical past? Have you got any insane mark-up snippets we can get nostalgic over?