Challenge: What’s the worst you can do?
After reading through the comments on my levels of CSS article I find that I few people seem to think that the article is a way to ridicule beginners. It’s not. It’s a way to document the steps that I think I have climbed. Some people also thought that this set of levels is a good indicator of how good sites you will make. That’s also false. Being Level 5 or 6 in the list means that you are a good coder, nothing else. It does not mean that a site you make is any good, I’ve seen many sites that have great code but that still makes me want to kill someone. Don’t confuse good web developers with good coders. “Don’t be a rotten standardista” as Molly Holzschlag would put it.
The challenge
To give you a perspective of how bad it really could be I’m challenging all the readers of Friendly Bit. It’s kind of a competition (with no prize) about who can make the worst site. The rules are simple; you are to construct a page, using HTML and CSS (and Javascript if you think you need it) that has a design that is as hideous as possible. I want pages that make my eyes bleed, that make small children cry and makes Maddox write hate articles about you. Think of all the good things you’ve learnt and do the opposite.
Inspiration for a truly hideous design
I won’t be giving out any prize but what I can do is help you with some ideas of bad code.
Make use of the <marquee> tag. It makes any content inside it scroll in the speed and direction you choose. Did you know that you can wrap <body> in a marquee tag? That’s right, your entire page will move automatically. You can also nest several marquee tags inside each other. Ohh yeah!
Another good tag you can use is the <blink> tag. Can it be applied to, say, a table? I hear you ask. But of course. You can have a full screen blinking table on your company homepage.
Continuing with the good ideas we have the oldschool frames we all have come to like. Did you know that there are no set upper limit on the number of frames you can load? You can have thousands of them! You can even mark up a whole tabular grid with frames alone.
This challange is about terrible code as much as it’s about terrible design. So don’t go with well-formed or the basic foundations of HTML. Did you even try putting tags inside other tags? <font <font size="2"> size="3"> is quite fantastic don’t you think? Make your page upside down by adding the <head> below the <body>, but only after you have added your own <neck> tag to the mix. Surprise me!
How to accept the challenge
To join all of this you just have to make the page, put it up on your server and link to it here. Post a link as a comment or simply trackback (link to this post) from your own blog and it will show up here.
Finally: Don’t forget the lesson behind all this. When you see a site with bad code, know that there’s a lot of much worse sites out there.
- Emil Stenström
- 11 Mar, 2006, CSS, HTML, JS
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