I've had a miserable few days at work trying to convert a proof-of-concept application into a usable test version. Basically there is a XHTML template applied to XHTML content pages, and chunks of XML (from different places) are converted into an overall page. The Perl code is tiny, and as I really like LibXML/LibXSLT I don't have much work to do.
The problem started when my boss, in good faith, asked if it could be rolled out company wide on the intranet. So a colleague of mine, a very good graphic artists, did a "graphic" make over, and my boss liked what he saw, so he wanted the technology with the pretty face, and could he have it before Xmas.
The graphic designer, who has done many web sites before then worked away feverishly in Dreamweaver MX, to produce HTML. It looks very pretty, and I can't deny it's much nicer than the HTML I made...........
BUT it's horrid, convoluted ancient HTML, with tables everywhere, font tags all over the place, shims and padding table elements and graphics. It's invalid XHTML, with no CSS anywhere is sight. It's horrid beyond belief, I've not made HTML like that in years. It's like looking at a page produced by an untrained teenager with FrontPage trying to impress grandma!
Needless to say it's proved very difficult to get the bits to marry up, HTML-Tidy keeps fixing his code, the XHTML parser keep complaining about invalid or non-well formed code, and the poor guy can't do CSS or XHTML by hand, Drwamweaver seems to have addled his brain.
I'm not looking forward to tomorrow.....
If Dreamweaver wrote Perl, everything would be for Perl 4, and every file would have everything you ever wanted pre-added at the top. It would look very nice, but be very big and slow to run, and it would be impossible to alter without Dreamweaver....
PS. I use to like Dreamweaver once....
