The Underscore Archives

I've just finished a government website and was totally, 100% happy
with it. It was awesome. Fantastic markup & css. Great accessibility
reports from RNIB - only a coupla minor things which were dead easy to
fix. Great jquery things going on... you get the idea.

Suddenly, out of nowhere (i.e. management forgot about them), some
pages that still need doing turn up on a different server. These pages
do not even vaguely conform to standards (hahahaha!), they are a
massive usability fail (more than one submit button per form, no
labels, all the classic mistakes), idiotic document flow, etc.
Needless to say, the markup could not be changed - they are login
pages, shared with a host of other.gov.uk sites and the requirement
was that they must look like the designs (and be accessible, natch).
Also, we cannot break the pages on the other sites.

Of course, the chosen solution was not the correct one, which was to
throw the HTML away and do it correctly for all sites. The solution
was to make the duff HTML look like the Photoshop mockups using
Javascript. The results are impressive, considering what I started
with, but it made me feel dirty and want to vom. It also took ages. I
guess that sometimes, you gotta forget your principles and be a ho if
you want to get paid. Bit like shopping at Tesco.

R

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