Friday, May 25, 2018

Pretty Sure I Covered This Type of Issue Elsewhere in the Maze of 6000 Posts.. But it Still Makes Me Smile

I do not have intimate knowledge of the job role who created the help text on my electric company's website. When I paid my electric bill today, I clicked the Help link and saw what you see to the left. For the sake of this post, I am assuming a technical writer wrote the help text you see.

That said, I do not understand how that technical writer can allow it to exist on the company's public website. It makes me think that either that technical writer doesn't work for the company or doesn't know how to fix it.

I'll hope for the first option, but suspect the second.

This is what I see:
  1. The purple rectangles are fine. 
  2. The red rectangles indicate that there is not a definition for
    ol li li that has indentation.
  3. The green rectangle indicates that there is likely an ul instead of a ol under the "Update Stored Account" heading.

For me, it would be a very simple job to fix the HTML code.

What I wonder about is whether that technical writer even viewed their code in a browser prior to publishing it or routing it to someone else to publish it. In either scenario, the HTML code is wrong. 

Well, first of all, the HTML code of that page is absolutely hideous! No one should be using [b][i]Title[/i][/b] instead of a h (heading style). If you look really close, you'll notice that instead of putting the "heading" in a p (paragraph) tag, the author used a br (break) tag to achieve the desired formatting. It's very ugly.
I learned HTML on my own by reading various websites and investigation of cool-looking websites. When I was trying to learn all about WinHelp files, first, I would seek out WinHelp files that I could download, and second, I would use the Help Workshop .exe file and decompile the WinHelp file and then look at how to incorporate what the Technical Writer did originally. I applied that same type of logic to when I was tasked with writing the help text in HTML pages for a system called "EBPP" which may or may not even exist. I had to figure out what to do on my own and, to do that, I downloaded many HTML pages with really cool visuals that I wanted to incorporate. I took that ugly source code and dumped it into Dreamweaver, then cleaned up the code. Of course I think my cleaned up web page is much better than the original.



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