WDR #2: Web Developers Needed for a Website

Post from November 25, 2008 (↻ October 19, 2022), filed under  (feed).

This and many other posts are also available as a pretty, well-behaved ebook: On Web Development.

The Web Dev Report, issue #2, this time featuring a classic situation.

The Web Dev Report: Web developers needed for a website.

Transcript.

(Back in 2005.)
Guy 2:
How many web developers does it take to build a website?
Guy 1:
…?
Guy 2:
Two.
One to build the tables. Another one to calculate the values of the colspan and rowspan attributes.
Guy 1 and Guy 2:
Muahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Toot or tweet about this?

About Me

Jens Oliver Meiert, on September 30, 2021.

I’m Jens, and I’m an engineering lead and author. I’ve worked as a technical lead for Google, I’m close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for O’Reilly. I love trying things, sometimes including philosophy, art, and adventure. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.

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Comments (Closed)

  1. On November 25, 2008, 21:02 CET, Duluoz said:

    Oh thank God developing large sites with tables was before my time! Funny stuff!

  2. On November 25, 2008, 21:54 CET, Harry Roberts said:

    @Duluoz—same here! Although I did have to build a HTML email last week. I was nearly sick.

  3. On November 25, 2008, 21:57 CET, Kroc Camen said:

    You know your code is messy when your table recursion crashes the browser.

  4. On November 25, 2008, 23:35 CET, Jens Nedal said:

    Oh the times, when browser performance was so laggy, and all because of the underlying (X)HTML structure.

  5. On November 26, 2008, 0:45 CET, Steffen said:

    Back in 2005? I wonder if Guy 1+2 are still laughing in 2008 or if they are too busy writing articles about equal column heights in column layouts.
    Apart from the validity of the table layout approach: My feeling is that even without table layouts there are still too much (common) problems that waste more time than necessary of more than 2 web developers in software projects.

  6. On November 26, 2008, 11:29 CET, Ash said:

    I looked at an employers website in the interview a few years ago and it never stopped loading… which i thought was weird… the web guy said he’d ‘heard of CSS’ when i mentioned it as one of my skills… my head said something along the lines of frame two of the cartoon…

  7. On November 28, 2008, 9:27 CET, Jens Oliver Meiert said:

    Great guys, I knew you would love to discuss tables 😊

  8. On November 30, 2008, 22:42 CET, Paul@Green Home said:

    Classic stuff. I thought this was going to be a joke about web dev. clients to start with.

  9. On December 30, 2008, 17:25 CET, Amber said:

    Although we have all of the wonderful features now for web designing backed with teams of people to allow a single person to drag and drop features they wish to have on their site…too much has changed to me. I almost miss the simplicity of the basic header|paragraph structure. Although it was nice to mature from the webskins of 98′. Excellent mark-up*. I enjoy the sites that Keep It Simple