Today I began work on some very lightweight reconstruction on a site that will remain nameless. I was given the code recently and my instructions were to tart-up some of the aesthetics - mostly just images for corners needing alpha treatment and that sort of thing. It also needed some content changing. The site is not live, and is just a prototype knocked up by one of their coding engineers (from what I have established) and therefore I expected to be dealing with a table based layout with some ugly tag soup. My prerogative is to make the changes in two phases. Firstly get it live. The client is very keen for it to be up and running very quickly. In fact he'd like it up and running now. Then, when my schedule clears in a few months time, for me to implement this new-fangled CSS/XHTML stuff that I told him about. I think I'd forgotten how much I've learnt in a year.

The only description I could use for the file when I opened it up this morning would be 'Tag Vomit'. Not only had it become totally useless on browser support (I supplied them with a 760px wide image to cut up and implement for the design, and it has suddenly expanded to a 1088px wide fixed layout! Argghhh!), it also is riddled with tables, span tags, style="x" attributes and cheekily calls a XHTML document type without any extra closing tags. If I'd run it through the validator it would have crashed.

If you are not a web developer yourself this will mean nothing, so in brief I will explain. It is possibly one of the most god-awful website constructions I've ever come across. Anyone without a screen the size of Antarctica won't be able to view it, and only then if you are using Internet Explorer will you get the optimum viewing experience (seeing the content).

Therefore, although it really pains me, I am only going to be applying more crap. I'm can't try and resolve this problem until I have the time and resources available. Ideally I'd delay launch for the next few months, but with this not possible, I'll have to bodge. While I am committing a crime against usability, I will say that when it comes in for refit in 5 months, this site is going to be a flagship for good practise. Sorry to everyone in the meantime. Sincerely.

In other news, my house are all out tonight for the first time in a month. Hooray for the end of exams.