Back in September, I wrote a big post about how the folks down at Record (web version of one of the three major sports print publications — newspapers — in Portugal) had no idea of correct web development. And I said that, and now repeat, not because of the fact that it really doesn’t work at all in Safari, but because of the reason behind why that happens.

Through the largest Apple mailing list in Portugal, I was challenged to try to find some possible solutions for the problem. I invested a few minutes of my time thinking that by doing so, I’d be helping a whole community of users and helping the newspaper company itself. I proceeded to study what was wrong and trying to fix it. Making sure all the code was valid was something I completely set aside so big was the number of errors. I tried focusing on what kind of problems would be causing the disaster that it was viewing the site in Safari.

After a few minutes (not that many), I was surprised to see that it wasn’t that hard to locate the main problems. Basically, the use of height=”100%” on tables rows/columns is a basic “HTML 101″ no-no and it causes Safari to completely loose sense of what the tables (designing with tables is bad enough!) are supposed to look like… Removing the height property for the tables fixed the problem and kept the site viewable on other browsers, just like it was before. There were a few minor issues with some other wrong code, but those were (even more) easily discoverable!

I went on to fixing the .html, emailing the new file to Record and offering myself to help implement in case they needed (which by the look of things in the first place, they probably did/do). This was all done through Pedro Aniceto, after he was asked to challenge some Mac web designers - like this was a Mac issue - into providing possible solutions for the problem (apparently they don’t own Macs at that web design company…).

Today is February 19th. Almost 5 months have gone by. You’d think that such an easy fix would have been implemented. It hasn’t. I have lost complete hope of seeing it implemented. Maybe when they redesign… It’s sad, but unfortunately, not surprising.

As if all of this wasn’t enough, http://record.pt doesn’t even forward to http://www.record.pt… And they aren’t alone on this. A quick try over at many other major websites in Portugal, revealed the same problem. Don’t know the sysadmin of those servers/DNS, but they surely need to learn some more… I guess college classes don’t teach you that… *sigh*

How can this multi-million euro industry hire and maintain such incompetent people? Frustrating… :/