As some readers will know I really dislike social network sites – especially MySpace – but the other day a good friend asked me if I could make them a layout for them so I naively agreed.

I thought making a MySpace layout would simply require a knowledge of CSS and HTML. In fact, I have found my knowledge of HTML & CSS in some ways to be a curse as MySpace refuses some of the most common, and most important, HTML tags like <!– comment –>. This results in folks just wrapping their comments like <comment> most people commenting like this fail to see a problem.

MySpace is teaching people improper HTML and they obviously don’t care about conforming to any standard known to man-kind; I remember trying to assist a friend with HTML before and they didn’t see any problem using comments like the latter in the above paragraph, when I asked where they saw it they said in their MySpace template.

Indeed MySpace’s lack of conformity to standards has lead to much criticism. What annoys me most, though, is that MySpace prohibit their users from writing standard compliant code. For example, it strips the ‘#’ out of hex colour codes.

Fair enough, I know I’m a hypocrite moaning about this as my blog has 36 HTML errors. But a site like MySpace has so many designers at its disposal you’d have thought they’d spend the time needed to make it standards compliant (and in the process accessible).

What’s up with nested tables? Seriously? MySpace seems to insist upon placing everything inside tables which leads to frustration to anyone with any design knowledge.

I mean why oh why must I specify the style for ‘table table table table td’ (tabular data inside a table which is inside a table which is inside a table which is inside a table and then inside another?) instead of giving it a logical name like ‘.modules’? Mike Davidson’s popular post on creating a custom MySpace layout raises that exact point.

I hate how the use of tables makes development of a new layout much harder (because you must dissect the sourcecode to figure out what’s what).

Mike raises an interesting point that if MySpace switched from a table-based layout to standard compliant CSS and XHTML pages their page sizes would be reduced by about 4/5!

I’m aware switching away from a table-based layout would mess up all current designs but I think opt-in CSS layout couldn’t do any harm.

MySpace is like Geocities, but worse. MySpace, like Geocities, is now full of people with hideous, poorly designed websites with loud background music. Unlike Geocities, though, MySpace sucks away much of the ‘creativity’ one can use during the design progress. I was at an event once and someone commented how MySpace makes people more creative. They’re wrong. It helps people think of work-arounds or for the less tech literate of us helps us be a sheep.

Does poor web design equate to popularity? The MySpace Problem is an interesting post which I came across whilst writing this article. It questions if that ugly design leads to a site’s popularity. It quite possibly does, look at Amazon and eBay (an obvious exception being Google). The masses don’t see a problem with auto-playing music, obscene amounts of Flash and pink backgrounds with yellow text; perhaps the apparent ‘ugliness’ of MySpace is limited solely to nerds.

Another interesting post I came across is Want a flashback of crappy 1990’s web design? Visit MySpace!.

Tags: web design, design, myspace, web 2.0, web2, web 2, web2.0