MOSS: HTML Object Hierarchy

There's been many complaints about skinning/designing for SharePoint, and while some complaints can be debunked it's hard to argue that MOSS is not a mess, from an HTML object hierarchy standpoint.

I was looking at the InfoCision webpage, which is hosted in MOSS (or WSS - not sure), and I used the excellent View Source Chart Firefox extension to have a better look at the rendered HTML.

On a random content page, here is the path to the main content:

body > div > [table > tbody > tr > td] > [table > tbody > tr > td] > div > div > [table > tbody > tr > td] > [table > tbody  tr > td] > [table > tbody  tr > td] > div > p

According to Firebug, that poor paragraph tag is acted upon by no less than 12 - TWELVE - style sheet rules...  Debug that!

(This is not a rip on InfoCision's webpage - it's a nice example of customizing SharePoint's masterpages and themes to get a custom look and feel.)