Confessions Friday

Discussion

1. Jeremy Parrish

   I used the <blink&gt: tag because I thought it was cool.
2. Cedric Dugas

   Long story short, I used inline syle because the site I was fixing was ery old and I didn’t wanted to digg further in it.
3. David Walsh

   I used “onBlur” just yesterday. Obtrusive, but needed it to make things easier.
4. Buri

   Due to late hour i’ve managed to create infinite loop. Childish mistake using

   window.onfocus = function(){ ... alert('whatever'); }
5. Jared Harbour

   Have you ever done something with javascript for a client you wish you could take back? This is one of those things.

   The client was upset that their homepage wasn’t Flash as they were promised, even though all it had was a rotating photo and some drop down navigation. Why waste our time and their money right! Their problem was there was no pre-loader. Who needs a pre-loader for a homepage that loads in 1.2 sec, well apparently these people did.

   We coded a fake pre-loader in javascript. It counts from 0 to 100% and then fades in the homepage. I’ve never felt so dirty after coding something.
6. Ian Ring

   Someone I know is maintaining their own site, and is being introduced to HTML for the first time. He wanted some things aligned on the right beside some text, and I told him to use a . I don’t have time to teach him the art of CSS floating.

   I feel SO much better now! Like a weight lifted off my chest! thank you David!
7. Ian Ring

   @Buri:
   Oooh, the dreaded “alert onfocus”! Oh I hate that one! I stepped in one of those just a few days ago! When it happens in Firefox, all you can do is kill the process from Task Manager.
8. Ian Ring

   Someone I know is maintaining their own site, and is being introduced to HTML for the first time. He wanted some things aligned on the right beside some text, and I told him to use a table. I don’t have time to teach him the art of CSS floating.

   I feel SO much better now! Like a weight lifted off my chest! thank you David!

   ****
   by the way David you should HTMLencode your comments. I double posted this comment because in the first one I typed a “”
9. Eric Hynds

   I used div align=”center” not too long ago to band-aid an IE issue. I then took a shower and repented
10. Ian Ring

    holy moley I can’t use brackets around anything in a comment! that’s brutal.

    in my previous comment, the awkward empty space between comments contains a left bracket and the word table then a right bracket.

    you don’t need to strip out bracket things… just HTMLencode the content
11. Cedric Dugas

    Thats pretty intense Jared :P

    The worst I did in my entire career:

    There was this list of 500 items, they wanted to hide parts of it in javascript and make it show up on onclick, no matter what I said they wanted it to be dynamically made hidden for people who do not have javascript enabled.

    The page was taking forever to load in IE (like 20 seconds when it was not crashing). I could not believed what I done… I felt dirty for the rest of the week.
12. Lee Briggs

    @Jared Harbour: Did they complain that it wasn’t using enough of the processor as well? Just to give them real value for money, leave something running on a timer to chew up around a third of the process load, whilst doing nothing at all.
13. Alex

    I’ve used HTML3.2 tags on a nulled vBulletin version I uploaded on the “hacked” intranet server (HTML4 had already been invented then) of my programming school when I was 15. Τhe PC was in the headmaster’s office. I’ll let you guess what type of videos that sissy lala had :p

    ?
    
14. Ian Ring

    A few months ago, I was building a form that was supposed to be submitted via AJAX, then update the page using a response from the server. The API built by the back-end would accept the submission, but didn’t return the calculated result I needed to update the page. The platform developers didn’t have time to update and release a new version of the API. So, after receiving the response from AJAX, I used “document.location = …” to reload the current page. All that work to submit the form via AJAX, and we ended up reloading the page anyways.
15. aslam doctor

    I always used in place of
16. EllisGL

    I wrapped a DIV with an A… Just this Wednesday..
17. Jay

    @Ian re: window.onfocus loop, you might be able to spawn a new Firefox browser, then disable javascript in that window, then click ok on the alert in the looping window. That’s how I’ve dealt with some of those annoying rick-roll sites that were making rounds a while ago when I didn’t want to force quit firefox.
18. Sean Hood

    @Jay: I made one of them once and called the page donotopen.html, then opened it without reading it.

    Ctrl + W and hitting Enter at repeatedly sorted it eventually.
19. Ahmed

    I’ve been using a lot this week :(
20. James Lin

    I use my knowledge of html and css for the dark side – Facebook ads and even at one time for the adult industry.
21. Ahmed

    Oh, and I deliberately called jQuery jQueery (” ,)
22. Joshua

    Developed a site where the client wanted… frames. Tried my very best to talk them out of it, tried like hell. But they wouldn’t budge on the idea.
23. cancelbubble

    I said “this project is really interesting.”
24. James Lin

    @Joshua: I’d be interested in seeing that if it’s still online – I haven’t seen a dedicated frame site in years… I wonder how todays’ browsers handle it. I just picture old Netscape 2.0 frame borders!
25. Torkil Johnsen

    @Jared Harbour: Magnificent :D
26. Nick

    I took someone’s print ads, turned them into online banner ads, and I won an award for it.

    Eesh.
27. Ahmed

    @Nick: FRAUD!!! RIP OFF!!!

    lol :P
28. Eric Lightbody

    Client-side only validation for a recent web form. Hey, if you had to deal with the hell that is ASP, you would be tempted, too.
29. Jesus DeLaTorre

    I admit to paying attention more to my RSS and twitter feeds than my bug list. :)
30. Greg

    We have a bunch of clients using a clunky ecommerce solution written in classic ASP. Often times I’m tasked with adding a new field or feature to a couple products. Well, the system doesn’t have any built in way to do this unless I want to add the feature to ALL the products. So usually I end up digging through the 50+ include files, finding the correct line, and doing something like this…

    if productID ==1 OR productID == 2 OR productID == 3 (etc, etc….)

    I feel gross just thinking about it :/
31. Greg

    I once developed a ‘subscription system’ for a medium sized mag company which stored th details on several independent db servers. I flatly 5urned down the job initially but was begged to carry It out with no liability

    24 months later the same system is In place. Deceiving customers inthinking there subscribing online when in fact all payments are made via a pdq manually and the details being collaborated in one place

    I still have nigtmares to this day
32. Greg

    Apologies for the grammer. I killed my iPhone and my HTC hero doesn’t like your theme lol
33. David Walsh

    @Nick: Hahhahaha. That’s awesome.
34. Mark

    For a Windows based skin design, I obstruded the context menu in all browsers using window.oncontextmenu = function() { return false; } instead of MooTools…
35. Ryan Florence

    @James Lin: Most of the ruby and rails doc sites use frames: http://api.rubyonrails.org/
36. anthony

    @Jared Harbour: wow thats great . . . just made my day
37. Ken

    I still use bold instead of strong and line breaks. Of course, sometimes.
38. Q_the_Novice

    I’ve inserted javascript and html tags in a joomla index.php file
39. Arnar

    I choose to have a different opinion about IE6, I develope websites for Iceland and here only 1-4% of visitors use IE6 depending on wich age groups and wich market the sites are intended for.

    I try my best to make all the divs apear correctly and have the websites readable in IE6 but I do not go as far as arranging for transparant PNG’s.

    I will in the future display a red bar at the top of every page notifing users of IE 6 about the possibility to update their browsers. Not only so that I can do less work, for their own security and to stop the need for supporting this stoneage technology. In my CMS there will be a possibility to stop this bar from appearing and if need be I could take anygiven webpage and make it compatible with IE6 but if there is no one asking for it I will not make the extra effort.
40. gero3

    I made a function call itself 10 times it was called like this and it wouldn’t even crash in chrome.
    stripped down function

    function red(){ 
    var i=10;
    while (i--) {settimeout(red,100);}
    }
    red();
41. Ben

    I made a form that submits to a Google spreadsheet in a hidden iframe.

    Only way I can see if it’s been successful is to check the spreadsheet.

    If anything happens and it doesn’t submit, user still gets a pleasant “Success!” message.

    *shudder*