Tracking - a rant in D minor

Hello. We’re going to play a little game.

Look at this page.

It’s a simple html page with a small form in it. Nothing complicated there, is there? No. I built it, and Expression Engine renders it. Simple.

And then tracking got involved. How many errors do you think were in the HTML before tracking was put in? And how many after?

No really, have a guess. I’ll wait. Write down two numbers. Really. Have a guess. Do it. Scroll down when you’ve done that.

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Ready for the answers?

0 before, 60 after.

Sixty. Errors.

Errors, not warnings, mind. Every single one attributable to pasting in supplied tracking code.

I am sick to the back teeth of writing perfect HTML only to have it polluted by the shit code that tracking agencies send us. DoubleClick are the worst, but none of them get it right. This site is an extreme example in that every page including the one you just saw has one SiteCatalyst tag and four DoubleClick ones, so the problem is being amplified, but it’s still shit.

And it would be so simple to fix! The code they send us, every bloody time, is always the same format, so it’s obviously coming from some template/generator that would likely take a few minutes to update to contain valid HTML/JS. It’s not rocket science, it really isn’t. To manually correct a DoubleClick tag to proper valid XHTML1.0Strict takes about 2 or 3 minutes and that’s if you’re double-checking everything. The problem comes (at our end) when you have hundreds of the bloody things to paste into a site, which is a donkey job in itself. To further compound that work by having to correct each one is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

But if the tracking agencies just corrected their damned source code template, everyone in the business – and I mean that, everyone in advertising – would have better code in their sites.

It’s not a huge thing – of course it’s not, if it was it would have been fixed years ago. But it’s enough to annoy me a little bit about every site I build, and I reckon every professional front-end developer who cares about what they do would feel the same. Often they would manually correct their tags so that their sites validate, but they shouldn’t bloody have to. These agencies should supply valid code right off the bat.

I feel pretty strongly about this, as you can probably see, though I am at a loss to suggest how this could be fixed. I have (with the assistance of a colleague, a couple of years ago) sent emails to tracking companies detailing what they would need to do, and how simple it would be, and of course nothing happens. As far as they’re concerned there’s no problem, and that could be because we just keep sucking it up.

Perhaps we can say to them “Sorry, we can’t accept your tracking tags unless they validate”, but I don’t suppose that will make any odds. They obviously don’t care about it, and it’s not them who loses out if we don’t accept code from them, it’s the client.

This has mostly been a cathartic rant, rather than a call for action. I just wanted you all to know about the situation and how it gets under my skin, completely needlessly.

Thanks for listening.
–c.

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