It has been a while since my last post. I have been hard at work contracting at a top pharma company in the Philadelphia area, developing their new website. For some strange reason, this company has decided to use the SAP Portal system to power their website. This has cause me nothing but problem with codiong. Usually the SAP portal system uses dozens of iframes throughout the site. With this newest version of the SAP portal, they introduced something that SAP calls “the light framework.” The light framework replaces the annoying and inaccessible iframes with a just as annoying and unnecessary nested tabling system.
I have been developing the internal pages using 100% valid XHTML and CSS, but after it enters the portal, any CSS layout styles I used were pretty much rendered useless. The nested tables destroy any dignity I gave it with dirty markup.
Today, while surfing the SAP Developer Networks, I read the latest post from Sven Kannengiesser. He goes through a little exercise on how to make the SAP Portal a little more Web Standards compliant. I had to chuckle at the article because of its attempt to teach developers of SAP about web standards. On the one hand, I find it awesome that someone at SAP cares enough about the front-end code to post something on the SAP blog. On the other hand, if a developer writes clean and compliant code, the SAP Portal destroys it with HTMLB and design layouts from 1999. Companies pay top dollar for this system and the code is cluttered with inconsistencies. Some <table> tags are written in all CAPS, while others are mixed case, and others are correctly all lowercase. There are also a number of empty tables lying around for no reason. There are many attributes that are not surrounded by quotes and most single line elements are not closed properly.
Why do people pay top dollar for such a half-assed product? My only hope is that this post gets back to the SAP developers and they decide to hire Eric Myer to oversee the front end development and produced SAP code. Until that happens, I will keep beating the SAP framework into submission while trying to make it as semantic as possible.
