A Single Article

I want cruft-free cruft-free code, ok?

I decided to update my Text Link Ads plugin for the two sites where I use it, and I went through the usual process of downloading the plugin from the Text Link Ads site. Last time I did this, I found cruft in the markup produced by the plugin that applied CSS styles to the links directly, which I had to remove. This prompted me to write the entry How to remove cruft from Text-Link-Ads, which I’m pretty sure nobody really cared about.

This time, however, the download process didn’t force me to set styling properties for the plugin which I would never use… right at the beginning of the download process, I found an option asking,

Do you want the links auto-formatted by your theme?

with, obviously, a yes/no response. I was happy to see this and figured that the plugin would finally come with cruft-free code, containing nothing more than the basic semantic HTML that my CSS would be looking for. I picked “yes” in a hurry and downloaded the plugin… how disappointed I was! Here’s the cruft I got, even when I insisted on getting cruft-free code:

echo "\n<ul style=\"margin: 0; padding: 0; overflow: hidden; width: 100%; list-style: none;\">\n";
  foreach($this->ads as $ads) {
    echo "<li><span style=\"margin: 0; width: 100%; display: block; padding: 3px;\">".$ads->before_text." <a href=\"".$ads->url."\">".$ads->text."</a> ".$ads->after_text."</span></li>\n";
  }
echo "</ul>";

This is packed with very destructive properties, especially the margin:0 and padding:0, which ruined the appearance of these ads over at Liquid Designs. Obviously I had to go through the process of removing the cruft again, reducing the markup to this:

echo "\n<ul>\n";
  foreach($this->ads as $ads) {
    echo "<li>".$ads->before_text."<a href=\"".$ads->url."\">".$ads->text."</a>".$ads->after_text."</li>\n";
  }
echo "</ul>";

Notice the complete lack of inline CSS and random spaces… this is the kind of code I like. I still can’t understand why developers don’t offer the option of getting plugins and widgets like this… being a developer myself, I like to be in control of my code and I write my own CSS. I don’t need any extra help with the formatting of my markup, and cruft like this only wastes my time. I’m not trying to pick on Text Link Ads here; I see this problem everywhere. My message to all developers is this: offer cruft-free options, and make your cruft-free options truly cruft-free!