HTML coding for Craig's List, a step into the ancient past
Last night I was working on creating a Craig's List real estate listing for my wife for the first time and quickly cranked out some beautiful tableless HTML 4.01 strict compliant code, as I am use to doing, that used the "style=" attribute. Much to my horror, Craig's List stripped my style attribute instructions from all my tags except <dd>, <li> and <img>. I was stunned and flustered as I could not use any form of styling on <Hx>, <P>, <DIV>, <UL>, <DL>, etc. What was worse, was that they even stripped out the "title=" attribute from images, which meant no proper use of tooltips to provide descriptions of images (alt of course is for alternative text when a image does not display, NOT for tooltip descriptions).
This forced me to spend about three hours playing around to figure out what exactly Craig's List would allow. In the end, I had to revert to tables, font tags and <BR> tags to get the styling I wanted as the <P> tag even seemed to be set to "clear:all". This in turn created nightmare printing options (my wife wanted to print out the listing for her client) as images were not breaking across pages correctly due to the bastardized code.
Having to rely on coding tricks that have been obsolete for around eight years and are fraught with usability issues makes me almost feel like I need to go to confession for using them in a listing. At the very least, it was an unwelcome trip into ancient history and the bad old days of dirty code. :sick:
