Run away!
January 29, 2009 at 9:59 PM by Dr. Drang
I saw a link on delicious.com/popular to a BBC page entitled “How we make websites” and figured it must be a joke. But no, the folks at the Beeb really think they’re web gurus who should spread their knowledge to us lesser mortals.
I am by no means a web design expert, but because of a screen scraping program I wrote a little while ago, I am intimately familiar with some BBC web pages. I suggest you go here or here and view the page source, paying particular attention to the primary content of the page, the song list. We’ll ignore the ALL CAPS and straight quotes because we’re concentrating on HTML abominations, not typographic ones. Have you looked yet? No? Well, here’s a sample from last weekend’s “God’s Jukebox”:
Title: 'SONIDO AMAZONICO'<br />
Artist: LOS MIRLOS<br />
Album: THE ROOTS OF CHICHA (VARIOUS)<br />
Label: BARBES RECORDS<br />
<br />
Title: 'YA SE HA MUERTO MI ABUELO'<br />
Artist: JUANECO Y SU COMBO<br />
Album: THE ROOTS OF CHICHA (VARIOUS)<br />
Label: BARBES RECORDS<br />
<br />
Title: 'WHITE PLASTIC MOCCASINS'<br />
Artist: VILLAGE GREEN MACHINE<br />
Album: ENGLAND'S DREAMING SPIRES<br />
Label: PAISLEY ARCADE<br />
<br />
Title: 'TRYING TIMES'<br />
Artist: ROBERTA FLACK<br />
Album: FIRST TAKE<br />
Label: ATLANTIC<br />
<br />
Title: 'THE WIND'<br />
Artist: NOLAN STRONG & THE DIABLOS<br />
Album: THE ULTIMATE DOO WOP<br />
Label: EMPORIO<br />
<br />
Title: 'HEY BO'<br />
Artist: EDDIE BO<br />
Album: NEW ORLEANS FUNK #2<br />
Label: SOUL JAZZ<br />
<br />
Title: 'GENTLE ON MY MIND'<br />
Artist: ARETHA FRANKLIN<br />
Album: SOUL '69<br />
Label: ATLANTIC<br />
<br />
Yes, the formatting is done entirely through <br /> tags. Which fits in well with this bit of wisdom from the article:
If you’re working in HTML make sure you design your document to be semantically correct and accessible.
I’ve always been a big fan of the semantic break tag.
