First off, Happy Thanksgiving.
My primary project that is going on right now is migrating the 51K or so pages on our main web server into our new templates. So my group and I are having to go through each directory and first decide if the content there is relevant. We have no real clean up process, so many of the pages and directories are being deleted. We are about 35% of the way through the directories (not necessarily that far on the page count). And we are not using a content management system (CMS) so we are moving them all manually.
Screenshot of view source from pandora.com
That now brings me to my View Source Fail. Most folks on campus are excited about moving their pages into the new templates as they are a tremendous step up from where we were. That being said I have seen a few pages that have been moved without me knowing about it. This is necessarily a bad thing, unless of course it is done wrong. Then it causes all parties involved a little extra work.
Some folks have taken the view source method to see what the code for the new pages look like. Then they remove what they don’t need and throw up the page. This works fine until there is an update to the template. Since there is a repository that pulls in all the necessary files, things start to break because most of these “view source pages” don’t point to the repository.
So the point of this rant is not to bash the view source functionality, I have used it many times to help me out. I have also used it to see what others have done to help them out. But be aware that what you see isn’t always what you get. With so many people using server side scripting languages (PHP, Perl, ASP, Python, just to name a few), things can be done behind the scenes that manipulate what is shown when you just “View Source.” This is also true when server side includes (SSI) are enabled. With most scripting languages the file extension is no longer html or htm, so the flag should go up that something could be going on at the server level. With SSI enabled, the extension is still html or htm, so it is harder to know.
“Web work” isn’t as easy as view source makes it out to be. This is a good thing, because there are enough poorly done pages in the web world.
todd