For years I’ve been keeping an eye open for a new house in Amsterdam. So far, no luck. They are either too cheap or too expensive. (This is a common problem for the Dutch housing market.) But what continues to amaze me, is how incredibly shitty most websites in this sector are. They are bad, really, really really bad.

Take this one for instance. For starters, the html is invalid with 33 errors. So far no surprise. I’ve been known to produce invalid xhtml 1.0 strict occasionally; it happens. To be frank, you best not load up the source code for this website in any case. 

Javascript madness

It’s chock-full of Javascript insanity. This one is cool:

// Create some slides and add custom filters for Microsoft IE

Oh yeah real good. I love IE-specific code that just tries to execute in any browser. Good work there chaps. Naturally, there’s more than a few script language=javascripts in there. Erm, hello guys, we don’t use that since 1998 anymore m’kay? It’s “text/javascript” thanks very much. Preferably with CDATAs inside.

Then, this one:

eval("page" + id + " = window.open(URL, '" + id + "', 'toolbar=0,scrollbars=1,location=0,statusbar=0,menubar=0,resizable=0,width=450,height=450,left = 400,top = 200');");

Fuck me, why not just call window.open directly? I mean seriously, an eval? What are you guys smoking? Then there’s the cool onload call on the body tag. Christ, fuck me. Don’t do that. It kills all other onload events for the page. Add to the document.loaded chain instead. Seriously, do people really really really code stuff like this in 2008?

We don’t need no stinking CSS

No sir, we are going to pretend CSS does not exist. We are going to put link colors on the body tag! WTF! And we are going to put IE garbage in the style tag for images, simply because we are retards!

style="filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Fade()"

This coding style makes me want to puke. Here I am busting my ass to deliver conformant, valid, semantically correct html and bozos like this are still around?

Insult to injury

Try searching for things. It does not work. Try filling out the contact form. It does not work. (Let’s not even mention the lack of LABELs and complete disregard for accessibility.) Seriously, has anyone ever looked at this site? Have people been paid for this? I sure hope not. Even for some retard’s high school side project it’s appaling. It is so sub-standard, crayfish could do a better job. With their claws tied. Cooked.