SharePoint HTML. Party like it’s 1999!

I’ve been slowly hacking my way through the jungle that is Microsoft’s SharePoint templating system. A mix of various poorly named technologies and archaic markup.

After I finally realized that part of my problem wast that Microsoft forgot to apply any doctypes to their HTML, I finally made some progress. Yet, I was still baffled by some crazy layout issues that I was sure was due to some crazy built in HTML and CSS that was being spit out.

I turned on all the table borders and came across this gem of an example on the default publishing site page template:

sharepoing-list.gif

Wow. THAT brings back memories of creating endless navigation menus with custom bullets and specific styling.

Of course, that was way  back in 1997. You’d think a decade later Microsoft would have discovered the UL tag and CSS.

Maybe that’s expecting too much.