Why do people code badly?

August 2, 2007

At work I deal with web code every day. I’m really anal a stickler when it comes to clean code. Sometimes when I’m checking stuff previously coded by someone else months ago, I come across programming like this:

<table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0>

Are you serious? Where are those quotes? Then I see stuff like this:

<br>

OK so that’s not too bad, but I really need that closing slash!

<br />

So what do I have to do? I go through the whole page and clean it up, otherwise I will go crazy. Another thing I really like is even white space and indentation. It makes things easier to read when checking source codes. Well, back to fixing SQL injection vulnerabilities.