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Yes, that's the standard answer: good structure costs very little now but pays off greatly in maintenance and upkeep. And I believe it -- up until a point. Aft
by DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Yes, that's the standard answer: good structure costs very little now but pays off greatly in maintenance and upkeep.
And I believe it -- up until a point. After that point, too much structure becomes its own kind of hindrance, where you're looking at a UI and wondering "What the hell cascades do I have going on here to make that two pixels too far to the right?" (Or something like that)
So I don't think we disagree. The only thing I'm adding is that to determine the right amount of structure, add it in only as needed. So I imagine by the time you got to a multi-page site you'd be using external stylesheets and common classes. You just wouldn't start there.
Sure do like me some Bootstrap, though. And a good reset sheet is a no-brainer. Need to think about this some more. I think the key question is: how much of this do you really need?
For instance, right now I'm writing a small personal app to take a movie script in native file format and display it as a web page. Where did I start? With the function to do the translation, of course. Now that it's working, I can always manually execute it if I need to. I may just stop here. I've done enough.
If I really, really want something I can upload scripts to online, I'll write a page. Or two. Then I'll throw my uploaded file at my pre-existing function, return the file name, and I'm done.
I may have spent 10 hours on this so far.
By contrast, the "old" way of doing it was to start with setting up a site using all sorts of frameworks. Maybe decide on a color scheme. On the back-end side, I'd be creating a class graph and working through my persistence strategy. Maybe I could use Mongo! Wouldn't Ruby be awesome?
I tend to easily get focused on tooling and technique instead of just doing the fucking work. (Apologies for the profanity, but this took me a long time to figure out). So I've discovered for my own work, I need to concentrate on making sure I grow only the needed complexity. Nothing more. Way too easy for me to screw up in this area.
In the case of my little app, sure, I could start adding frameworks. Or I could just emit some HTML. Who knows? Maybe plain HTML with a few classes and some style information in the HEAD might be fine. That's a win.