Sometime today I noticed that youtube had updated their page UI to include a much tighter, cleaner meta data and feature display. The most drastic work was done beneath the video player and I have to say that I’m a fan. It’s clean, light, and most importantly its big enough to push the comments far down the page. I’m still working on an algorithm that determines the amount of views a video has to have before the commentary devolves into a cesspool of racism and homophobia.
Anywho, after seeing the UI changes I naturally pulled open the css to take a gander. To my surprise I found the following:
A table of contents is pretty normal … but alack … what is this all-caps CRAP section that I see. I scroll down to where it should be and see:
Mmmm, a nice steamy pile of class-itis. I can imagine how this came to be. The project is unfolding fast, deadlines loom and the page designs are shifting around slightly. As quick fixes, developers are throwing in a class here and a class there, merging changes, and making a working page. Eventually, the whirlwind settles and a huge wreck of a stylesheet exists. The pages go live and the classes are stuck. New pages are built and the bullshit gets grandfathered in. As development moves forward its hard to maintain good practices under the deadlines and you end up with things like this:
Ah well. Maintain your sense of humor youtube developers. Plug away and remove it eventually. All the crap in the stylesheet maybe adds an extra 2kb to file - maybe the equivalent of a split second of video.