CMS Grafitti Can Be Reduced
Saturday, June 21st, 2008
Over the last few years I’ve done a lot of tedious QA (Quality Assurance) which involves poring over front end markup (developer code) and through content written by untrained authors (Corporate Grafitti artists) in any given CMS (Content Management System). In some ways I don’t mind being the one who does QA because I’m a meticulous bastard with no quarter given to the repetitive slugs and slights actioned by less than perfect humans against the W3C specifications. There’s something geekily satisfying about bringing order to the chaos that reminds me of doing crossword puzzles. QA is a simple process of finding and fixing stuff page by page and line by line.
The Developers
The first problem area of QA - the developers themselves - can always be improved over time. Every project teaches new tricks and techniques so by the time you’re doing QA its probably quite an old site, or a migration over to a new CMS. I’d recommend you note and advise as unobtrusively as possible - from a huddled corner behind the water cooler - that there might be more effective ways to skin that cat. Semantics, for example, seems to be a curve rather than a binary step. I’ve learned the hard way over time to appreciate and acknowledge the good factors as well - so don’t just say the code is shit and storm out of the room.
