{"id":2046,"date":"2010-07-13T11:25:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-13T11:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jeffreyatw.wordpress.com\/2010\/07\/13\/website-review-treasure-island-music-festival-2010\/"},"modified":"2010-07-13T11:25:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-13T11:25:00","slug":"website-review-treasure-island-music-festival-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeffreyatw.com\/blog\/2010\/07\/website-review-treasure-island-music-festival-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Website Review: Treasure Island Music Festival 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

mentioned she liked reading my rants on how websites are built, and since I’m in the website-building business, it makes sense that I’d have some insights on what’s what. This is not to say that I’m an authority on how sites should be built, nor am I the only one spending time nitpicking. There are sites that focus on the whole package, like Sitecritic.net<\/a> and Web Pages That Suck<\/a> – both of which, for some reason, have pretty bad UI – but are thorough and well-written. As a developer, not a designer, I’ll try to focus mostly on use of code, and how websites that look just fine could greatly benefit from a bit of code rewriting.
\n(I don’t know if I’m going to write even more than one of these, so I decided I’d stick this on my personal blog for now.)
\nThe lineup for the 2010 Treasure Island Music Festival<\/a> was released yesterday. I’m pretty excited about everything on day 1 (being more of an electronic than indie guy). The color scheme for this year is a little strange (reminds me of a rotten fruit salad) but otherwise I like the design they’re going for. I was a bit appalled when I took a look at the code and a hodgepodge of tables jumped out at me.
\n\"The
\nThere’s a myth that the <table><\/code> element is an awful, taboo, even deprecated thing that shouldn’t even be thought<\/em> about when it comes to putting a site together. It’s false: <table><\/code> is great for, well, tables. Spreadsheets. Charts of data. Anything that can be logically arranged in rows and columns. But I don’t see any spreadsheets on this page:
\n\"Rotten
\nIn fact, I don’t see any rows or columns at all, in a traditional sense. I suspect tables were used to “speed up” development, as this reeks of a “slice and dice” job, where the developer was given a mockup and he decided, for some reason, to splice it into tiny bits and shove it into a series of convoluted tables with rowspan<\/code>s and colspan<\/code>s.
\nBottom line: splicing is baaaad. I can’t think of a situation in which splicing would be a good thing to do. When you splice a PSD into tiny images and scatter them throughout a page, you do a few things:<\/p>\n