On Sat, May 14, 2005 at 10:10:13AM +1000, Chad Renando wrote:
> It does seem as though adherance to one line of thought or another
> fits within religious ideals.  Personally, I consider the adherance to
> CSS to fall in the religions of:
> 
> "Expansion of Seperation", 
> where after you seperate into MVC, you seperate your View into Style
> and Content.
> 
> and
> 
> "Weight Reduction"
> the zealous reduction of the amount of code required for a given functionlaity
> 
> At the moment, with regards to the faiths of "best practice", I am a
> pagan like Sagan, ascribing to the religion of:
> 
> "Get It Out"
> where you pump out good functionality with crap code and pray daily
> that you'll know what you were thinking when it comes time to rebuild
> 
> Chad 
~snip~

This brings up an interesting (to me, anyway) question.  I guess to my
mind that the seperation is "what is correct" versus "what I know will
work".  With respect to the CSS-P/Tables question, it's no secret that
your table-based design, so long as it works in only a couple of
browsers will be viewable by >95% of the viewing public, complete with
all of the nice graphical features that the author intended.

Similarly, for the end user, the back-end code that you write is
entirely unimportant so long as it, within reasonable time, spits out
some display information (be it HTML/Flash/SVG/whatever) that lets them
see what they want to see.

Personally I cringe when the word from on high is that something needs
to be finished yesterday, and the easiest way to make it work 
-right now- is to make a page rely on a user having javascript, or
cookies.  I cringe when I think of the poor maintainer who has to work
out why on earth I stored a comma seperated list in a database table
instead of splitting it into several fields allowing them to use SQL
selection criteria in their search.  Yet the 
client/non-technical boss/accounting department are chuffed when it
'just works'.

In my own way I'm a pagan of sorts, I do much of my home web browsing in
a text-only browser, and I turn javascript off in my graphical browser
unless I want it on for a particular reason.

And now, the question: should my responsibility to my employer be to
a) Get the thing out the door.  Damned be your warm fuzzy feelings of
   doing something right when we just want to get the job finished and
   get paid for it.

b) Do what I consider to be the best job I can, and try to explain to an
   employer who will never see the back-end code and never turn off
   cookies that while a majority are, not everyone is in the same
   situation as he is.

What's the balance between moral imperatives and 'getting the job done'?

-T

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