43 Folders

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”What’s 43 Folders?”
43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

This isn’t the kind of code quality you should launch with

You shouldn't have launched the site with HTML this bad. Among other things, a does not take an attribute called ref, comments are delimited by strictly defined and easy-to-get-right characters, you have tons of empty h2 class="title" elements, you don't have a print stylesheet (thanks for burning through our expensive coloured ink), you're styling inside elements, you've got so many classes on some divs it's clear somebody doesn't understand the cascade, and by God you're actually still using tables for layout.

And you have the temerity to label this nonsense XHTML Strict. No wonder the thing breaks in IE6; the site's HTML is broken.

43 Folders: The Failed Redesign of September ’07.

Think you can fix the problems using your 43 Folders system? That I’d like to see.

gabriel's picture

Don't blame Drupal

Drupal is a kick-ass content management system with an excellent template engine that allows you to completely structure the underlying HTML of your site however you want, so you've got control of the code's output; Drupal is not the one at fault here.

Garland, for example, has perfectly valid HTML (I'm using ?q=blog here because the homepage's markup has been taken over with user-contributed content and isn't a trustworthy example of its code's quality) and uses well-structured markup, so you can't blame Drupal for producing invalid code.

I'll admit that sometimes some modules can get a bit excessive with assigning classes to elements (e.g. <div id="block-user-1" class="clear-block block block-user">), but that is only to create enough hooks for you so that you are not restrained when styling them with CSS. That aside, Drupal's code quality is quite good (and it surely doesn't use tables for layout unless you put them there; it wouldn't be my (LAMP-powered) CMS of choice if this were the case).

 
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