Code snippets on Microsoft website shown in form of images.

I think a more disturbing detail here is the alt text being used on the images themselves:<p><pre><code> Description: \\christw4\c$\TranslatorHelp\en-us\GSG_files\image014.png Description: \\christw4\c$\TranslatorHelp\en-us\GSG_files\image015.png </code></pre> <i>edit</i> formatting

Curious. Sometimes people do that sort of thing to avoid copy/pasting, but I wonder if in this case it's a poor man's way of getting syntax highlighting on the web: just screenshot an IDE instead of dealing with a syntax-highlighting-in-HTML tool.

Based on the formatting, it looks like a screen capture from Visual Studio. Ugly.<p>Probably just some poor soul trying to meet some arbitrary deadline, and the screen shot and crop method was the easiest solution. Or, maybe they were the first person in a workflow, and they had no idea that it'd be translated into web content.<p>Not defending it, but just saying - I've been there, and I'm sure you have, whether we like it or not.

Someone please explain how this isn't a Reddit-esque tempest in a teapot?<p>Sure, it's silly, but getting angry over it? Ridiculous.

More importantly, that is some of the nastiest looking JavaScript I've seen in a while.<p>I think MS are doing everyone a favour.

Come on!<p><a href="http://www.bing.com/search?q=code+highlighter+online" rel="nofollow">http://www.bing.com/search?q=code+highlighter+online</a>

On the plus side having to manually type all of it will help developers learn it better.

Keep in mind that most of the MSDN has copy-pasteable links (at least last time I checked, i.e. this morning), e.g. the entire set of .NET BCL reference docs. But, they don't use a syntax highlighter on those, boo to them.

I would like to see how long it stays that way ... people make mistakes, but if you are on the front page of HN for a wrong reason, you leave everything aside and fix it.

That's catfooding right there.<p>The site has something to do with javascript on the web, which is very close to html/css, and it does not ever use formatting as seen on many other sites (code coloring).<p>(Okay, I'm total html/css/js noob, never done a web page in my life, but I think it's wrong).<p>And in the past examples were showing just right in MSDN, along with way to switch between C#/C++/VB/etc.

How else can you guarantee how it will look in a feed reader (many of which strip styles or ignore stylesheets)? The Web is one thing, the places that ignore your styling.. quite another ;-)

Any reason why they would want to prevent the code from being searchable from external search engines? Software patents..etc.

How else can you get it to work in IE?

Since the page is all about translation, could it be to avoid online translators (like Google Translate) to attempt to read that code and translate it since you expect many of the visitors to the page coming from a locale different than English?<p>Or, does Google Translate etc. handle this and not attempt to 'translate' code?

I'm OCD about code, and that Javascript makes me want to rip my hair out.

I hope it was an accident/mistake, otherwise it makes Microsoft look ridiculous as fuck.

It's a step up. I think they used to use silverlight to show code snippets.

i am so sad now, i event cant find proper words for a meaningful comment