I have received an increasing number of advertising inquiries from MySpace layout sites. Apparently the term “MySpace layouts” is a very popular search term these days. Looking at the default MySpace layouts one can unserstand why. I am confident that they didn’t hire a designer to create the default MySpace look and feel. Looking at the MySpace HTML, they certainly didn’t hire a GUI developer. The markup looks like it was ripped from a teenage fan site from the early nineties:
- There is no doctype declaration. Not that it would have mattered anyway…
- The markup starts out nicely with divs and spans and then freaks out with some classic table layout. I though that went away in the nineties…
- Inline styles are used all over the place.
- Headings start at level 5. And continues to level 4…
- Images are missing an alt attribute.
This contributes to making MySpace an inaccessible mess. What does it prove? That you can be successful with a crappy site? Maybe the laugh is on me.