Perils of Working with a Third Party Application

Written on March 11, 2016

At my current employer we use a third party application/service called . Their CSS framework is full of “suck” and where they decide to employ classes (and not) in their HTML is absolutely mystifying.

Some places you have heirarchies like:

<body id="MainBody">
  <form id="MainForm">
    <div id="content-wrap">
      <div id="content">
        <div class="body-area">
          <div id="ContentMiddle">
             <!--stuff you may show to the user-->

Everything is wrong with that. There’s no consistency in the naming of ids and classes. Why is “body-area” inside “content” ? It’s nonsense.

Then, in other places, there is a bizarre hit-and-miss style of using classes on page elements. On one page, the only way to target a certain class-less table is to use the class-name of the table before it, and then the + operator, like:

.body2853 table.Summary + table

Why not just give them both classes?

But really the most painful thing I had to do (and the thing which spurred me to write this) is this:

td[align="right"] {
    text-align: left;
}

There was simply no other way to accomplish what we wanted to do. There were no classes or ids in the near vicinity of the <td> elements in question, and the align=”right” was hardcoded. To my mind, needing to write code like that qualifies this third-party application as a total heap of dung.

Jake Paris

in Maine, in 2024

Perils of Working with a Third Party Application