Hello,

I’m a Sr Dev who mostly has done back-end work but I’m “dangerous enough” in front end frameworks to get things done in my job.

I have another Sr Dev on my team who is ADAMANT on using ul/ol’s everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE.

Navigation menu items will get done as a list.

Say I have a list of key value pairs or tags describing an item on a page, that’s a list. If there are two sections on a page that’s also a list. Even forms are built as lists of inputs and buttons. To the point where I’m positive if I told them to recreate the google front page I’m 100% they’d make a ul and a li for the image, another for the box and a separate li for the buttons.

My frustration is that every piece of documentation regarding ordered lists and unordered lists are for literally listings out items as numbered or bulleted lists, not logically grouping things on a page. Also our code is littered with extra css to strip out the bullet points and numbers on a basic li item.

I’ve worked on several projects and this is the first time I’ve ever seen lists so overused. Is this normal on some projects? It feels wrong but I don’t know the exact terminology to use to explain why, given my inexperience in front end development.

  • sorrybookbrokeEnglish
    51·
    5 months ago

    This is an old standard, long ago when CSS wasn’t a big thing, and even when it was when it was much less featureful, tables where the only way to properly position things. This is no-longer the case and is now bad practice and has been for more than a decade. This is due to defailt styling added to list elements along with a few other issues with speed and consistancy

    Don’t know them, but this seems an older Dev who learned something one way and is entirely unable to adapt with changing technology. This is a danger, and has been the reason for quite a few major, very expensive, issues at companies I’ve been contracted at. Sure, using tables and lists is not a big issue, but what else will he do and defend aggressively? I’ve seen the same with a person arguing SQL injections are fixed because he took out all comment characters before concatenating a string for an SQL query.

    • PoopMonster@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      5 months ago

      There’s quite a bit in this project that’s very unorthodox mostly because a decision was made early on that most frameworks were too “opinionated”, so now we have a mish mash of shit that barely works together and I’m sure that once this app is handed over to a client they will likely not understand it and rewrite it from scratch.