molly.com
Wednesday 27 May 2009
DailyShow HTML for Video
Dear Jon Stewart,
I am an adoring fan who has followed your career since you first started doing talk shows on the Comedy Channel some 15 or more years ago.
You are a funny, well-educated, articulate man whom I consider to be a true American Hero.
All the fangirl worship aside, can you use your political influence to improve The DailyShow Web site? While HTML might not be your forte’, oh holy moly this code is so filled with bad bad things that it requires immediate diplomatic assistance.
Love always,
Molly
And now, the code
Now, dear readers, what do you think of this lovely embed video code? I mean, really.
<table style=’font:11px arial; color:#333; background-color:#f5f5f5′ cellpadding=’0′ cellspacing=’0′ width=’360′ height=’353′><tbody><tr style=’background-color:#e5e5e5′ valign=’middle’><td style=’padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;’><a target=’_blank’ style=’color:#333; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;’ href=’http://www.thedailyshow.com/’>The Daily Show With Jon Stewart</a></td><td style=’padding:2px 5px 0px 5px; text-align:right; font-weight:bold;’>M – Th 11p / 10c</td></tr><tr style=’height:14px;’ valign=’middle’><td style=’padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;’ colspan=’2′><a target=’_blank’ style=’color:#333; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;’ href=’http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=225113&title=the-stockholm-syndrome’>The Stockholm Syndrome</a></td></tr><tr style=’height:14px; background-color:#353535′ valign=’middle’><td colspan=’2′ style=’padding:2px 5px 0px 5px; width:360px; overflow:hidden; text-align:right’><a target=’_blank’ style=’color:#96deff; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;’ href=’http://www.thedailyshow.com/’>thedailyshow.com</a></td></tr><tr valign=’middle’><td style=’padding:0px;’ colspan=’2′><embed style=’display:block’ src=’http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:225113′ width=’360′ height=’301′ type=’application/x-shockwave-flash’ wmode=’window’ allowFullscreen=’true’ flashvars=’autoPlay=false’ allowscriptaccess=’always’ allownetworking=’all’ bgcolor=’#000000′></embed></td></tr><tr style=’height:18px;’ valign=’middle’><td style=’padding:0px;’ colspan=’2′><table style=’margin:0px; text-align:center’ cellpadding=’0′ cellspacing=’0′ width=’100%’ height=’100%’><tr valign=’middle’><td style=’padding:3px; width:33%;’><a target=’_blank’ style=’font:10px arial; color:#333; text-decoration:none;’ href=’http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/index.jhtml’>Daily Show<br/> Full Episodes</a></td><td style=’padding:3px; width:33%;’><a target=’_blank’ style=’font:10px arial; color:#333; text-decoration:none;’ href=’http://www.thedailyshow.com/tagSearchResults.jhtml?term=Clusterf%23%40k+to+the+Poor+House’>Economic Crisis</a></td><td style=’padding:3px; width:33%;’><a target=’_blank’ style=’font:10px arial; color:#333; text-decoration:none;’ href=’http://www.thedailyshow.com/tagSearchResults.jhtml?term=Republicans’>Political Humor</a></td></tr></table></td></tr></tbody></table>
Did you enjoy that as much as I did? Knew you would.
Filed under: HTML, WaSP, accessibility, css, javascript, standards, w3c, web design and development
Posted by: Molly | 20:15 | Comments (12)
Holy Font Tags! Hopefully John will listen to your please to encourage the daily Show site to use web standards. this makes me wonder if the code for the Colbert Report wesbite is equally cringe-worthy.
So many of these sites provide embed or affiliate link code snippets with little regard for tidyness or sanity. One would think that if they were asking people to replicate their code ad infinitum, they’d try to make it at least pleasant to work with.
It appears to be part of a loop which on the developers end, probably doesn’t look (as) bad. The majority of it is just inline styles which could easily be embedded in the page, or an external stylesheet if it was used elsewhere.
@neal – er yeah. If a person knew anything about code. Think about how viral something like this is. It’s provided to a very broad demographic, perpetuating problems and bad habits unbeknownst to the innocents who are simply thinking “I really liked this video, and how cool, I can paste it onto my site/page/whatever.”
looks like a copy/paste from Excel to me.
I wonder what would happen if we all emailed him. We can point him to this article and say, “Here! See that? Help us, plz.”
I’ll have to look for a contact button on his website.
Perhaps just side step the source code for an appropriate video piece on the Daily Show, e.g. Elizabeth Warren’s interview, and embed directly, with appropriate permission and credits, into your own web content and coded correctly. Did it, done it and Warren rocks.
Maybe we could get so annoying as a webcrowd, that Molly will be invited to the Daily Show
On a more serious note, I guess we should point mr. Stewart’s web crew to a very old article of Eric Meyer(?) who once calculated how much money Microsoft would safe if they would strip out all the crap out of their HTML code.
Maybe we could start to sell webstandards with the slogan ‘Make your website recession resistant’?
While we’re peer pressuring Jon Stewart into fixing his HTML, you might be interested to know, there is also a campaign going on to lure him onto Twitter
http://twitter.com/realjonstewart
That’s very strange… there’s an EMBED tag in there, but no OBJECT. Does it work for all browsers, and is there a link to the original document it came from…?
jd/adobe
My wife pasted that code into a blog entry and it broke her layout (and not by being wider than the container or anything obvious like that). I had to go in and clean that beast up, and it was not fun at all, even when using awesome tools Firebug. Complete suckage, that HTML.
Perhaps just side step the source code for an appropriate video piece on the Daily Show