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Thousands of errors!

I was assigned to a new project recently. Well, an old project actually, written in classic ASP. Now a new version of the application is being written in the latest ASP.NET, but it's not expected to be RTM in a while (estimated release date is January 2017) so I have to perform some maintenance on the old application until it can be discarded.
Also, I've got a feeling that not all customers will be switching over to the new program immediately, so this version will probably be around for a while.

And the problem is, it's full of errors. Parts of it date back to the previous century, when there were no web standards, and I don't really mind about Quirks mode, and width and height attributes instead of CSS, tables used for layout, framesets etc, but oh, all those errors! width="20px" all over the place, onchange="javascript:...", and in those places where they do use css, style="width:20" and style="width=20px" are commonplace. Not to mention plenty of lines where there are contradictory width and style attributes. Etc etc.
As a result, the web application only runs under IE, and only in compatibility mode. It's clear that the developers never looked at code validity, only if what came out looked like what they had in mind it should look like.

And I don't know how to handle that. I find it impossible to close my eyes to those errors while looking in the code for other errors.
I can of course do a global find and replace to get most of the issues out of the way, but that would mean my first commit would consist of thousands of changed .asp files. Can I do that?

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11
  • 28
    "mistakes which are now features" - oh, the joy...
    – F.P
    Commented Jun 20, 2016 at 8:04
  • 36
    Indeed be very cautious in what you touch, This immediately came to mind: xkcd.com/1172 Commented Jun 20, 2016 at 9:38
  • 3
    Please clarify ... JFDI ...
    – GER
    Commented Jun 20, 2016 at 13:08
  • 5
    @GER "Just [expletive] Do It" which means to eschew normal standards and testing and other things and just get a fix in without caring whether it's done in a maintainable and readable way.
    – Nzall
    Commented Jun 20, 2016 at 13:22
  • 3
    like aglie but more so
    – Ewan
    Commented Jun 20, 2016 at 13:33