This Website Must Be Studied For Science

Eddie Cross is a former Zimbabwean politician and economist. He was an advisor to President Mnangagwa (ED) who ruled the country after the previous long term President Mugabe “resigned”. He’s now known for the articles he writes on Zimbabwe’s economy and what we can do to improve it. Guess his suggestions were ignored when he was advising ED, but I digress.

While I usually see his articles on The Zimbabwean, he posts the articles to his own website, www.eddiecross.africanherd.com and it’s something to behold.

Despite how it looks, it’s somehow responsive!

I’ve looked through the HTML and the HTML is very non-semantic as if it retained web design from the early thousands. At least the images have alt text. I’m suprised that the site is still regularly updated and it has https! I wonder how he does it? I can’t see anything outlining the technology used other than a note saying that This site is best viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0!

The site is attached to The Morning Mirrors by Margaret Kriel who’s written 1000 articles! with a similar technology. She takes submissions which requires very strict formatting else it takes a while to fix. There’s also this note on not accepting posts with foreign characters:

We have to manually remove all of these - for Zim’s with old modems - and change them to normal keyboard characters which takes us hours

I wonder how non-ASCII characters caused lots of problems for modems?

As you can seem, I’m very impressed at how all of this is working. As they say, if it aint broke… There’s also a guestbook which looks like it hasn’t been added to in a long time. I sent an email with a link to this post but Apple (who manages the mac.com emails), wisely rejected it. I sent another one so let’s see how that works out.