This is a single post from deeden.co.uk made during the period May 2002 to April 2009. During a previous grand redesign I decided to make a break with the past and consign the old entries to history. This entry is from August 2005 and lives here forevermore.

Excessive markup

I was looking at the markup on the Argos site yesterday (for my PriceWatch project, if you must ask) and I came across the following markup monstrosity.

    <table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 border=0>
    <tr>
     <td valign=top><img src=/wcsstore/argos/en_USimages/t.gif
                         width=1 height=1 border=0 alt=""></td>
     <td valign=top class=productPriceLarge rowspan=2>129</td>
     <td valign=top><img src=/wcsstore/argos/en_US/images/t.gif
                         width=1 height=1 border=0 alt=""></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
     <td valign=top class=productPriceSmall>&pound;</td>
     <td valign=top class=productPriceSmall>.99</td>
    </tr>
    </table>

That overblown piece of complication is there to make the price of the item look like so…

129.99 pounds graphic

The table is overkill, I think we can all agree on that. The part that annoys me however is have the pound sign between the pounds and pence of the price. How awful is that? Pretty terrible I must say. Why not just do something like…

    <span class="price">&pound;<span>129</span>.99</span>

which with a bit of proper css will render as £129.99

I rest my case :)