While working for an entity who will rename unnamed, I once was asked by the online services manager to examine a page to try to find the cause of some layout woes. I dutifully opened up the page only to see a maze of twisty code, all alike.

The page started, ended and was filled top to bottom with table code, perhaps no worse than many modern sites but certainly no better. In the middle of it all I found a nested mass of code that was almost impossible to decipher. There were multiple cells, empty but for non-breaking spaces (oh, don't get me started on those) and with background colors set. There were cells even smaller than that, set to run the width of the element but only one pixel high.

It was with an almost Lovecraftian feeling of horror that I realized what I was looking at. The Web designer, who in fact had been well paid for this mare's nest, didn't know how to add a border to an element. So, using the same hammer he used for every other problem, he had laboriously constructed a border around the element using colored narrow table cells. How many hours this took and how much wasted code was written I can only speculate. But I guess it was at that moment that I fully internalized this realization: Just because someone is a professional doesn't mean he knows what he is doing.