Apple iWeb: Spawn of Satan; The Most Perverse Thing I have Ever Seen in My Firebug

I was doing a little SEO work for a friend. I thought the job would be simple enough... but that was before I knew of the iWeb. Even Dreamweaver, back in 2004's wysiwyg editor seems like a forward thinking, beacon of semantic markup compared to this monster.

But I'm getting ahead of myself... lets go back to why she had to pay me to do SEO work:

  • A clever iWeb javascript function, named onload()m cloaked all of her pages content. Nothing was visible on the site if javascript was turned off.
  • The site cloaking JavaScript apparently serves no purpose, so simply removing it from the body resolved the situation, except...
  • ...the navigation bar in the site, relies on javascript too. Curiously, it doesn't get called in the onload() function, but for the life of me, I have no idea what on earth might be inserting it into the html. If I turn javascript off, again: boom... no navigation.

But these SEO problems are nothing compared to iWeb's technique of inserting a simple image onto a page. It was so barbaric, so eccentric, so disturbing that I had to take a screenshot.

Bearing in mind that z-indexes and absolute positioning are used to float an image over this markup, this Apple's "think different" answer to:


img {
position:relative;
margin:1em 0;
}

Take that Dreamweaver!