CCP vs The Web
As some of you may know, I’m working on an userscript that will give you the ability to get a fix of your favorite Internet Spaceships while at work. As I mentioned in my previous post, this is taking longer than expected due to the awful front-end coding outputted by EVE Gate. When I say “awful”, I’m still being kind, since we’re not far from the perfect “things not to do” case.
Here’s a quick recap of what’s wrong with the gate, from a pure front-end coding point of view.
#01 - Hard-coded decorative images
Yeah, I’m getting straight to (one of) the most awful thing you can see on the Gate’s code. Take a good look at the main menu. It’s composed of two lists, each one containing a set of “li” tags, nothing bad for now. But sadly, it looks like the CCP Web team is still looking for a way to get borders straight, since they inserted additionnal “li” tags in between navigation elements. This, my Internet friends, is without a doubt one of the most stupid things you can ever do while coding a front-end. In fact, I think that’s what you learn first when you start doing HTML.
#02 - ID and Classes with the same name
I almost fell of my chair when I saw this.
IDs are supposed to be a unique, identifying name for an HTML element. Classes are supposed to be generic and re-usable. You can script using classes or IDs alike, so there’s simply no excuse for this.
#03 - Javascript to place boxes in a table
I’m looking at you, EVE Gate calendar. As you can see over there, the table cells from the Calendar view are empty, with the exception of the day number. The actual content of those cells is located in a bunch of div’s located underneath. Those are then placed above the table cells with some javascript. Once again, I really don’t see the point of all this.
#04 - Everything else
I’m not gonna post every single line of code that makes me die a little inside, because I simply stopped looking. Making EVE Gate safe for work should be as simple as a CSS file swap. Unfortunately, CCP Web devs seems to rely heavily on automatically generated HTML/CSS/Javascript code (yeah, much like Frontpage do). As for me, I’ve been struggling for the last days with the calendar view, the main spike in the foot of my #sfwevegate project, and it’s driving me real mad.
“Maybe they’re good at back-end, it’s not that bad after all” was what I thought at first. Now the great forum debacle is over, I really don’t know what they’re good at.
