CHAPTER 3 The Vanilla Web Diet
to save time, or they omit quotes around attributes to save yet another
keystroke from adding to the workload in long documents. Either practice
means you save some time now but both lead to confusion later on when
you need to extend your code. Omitting the quotes around attributes, for
example, only works until you need to add another value that is space sepa-
rated (for example with the class attribute), so why not add them right now
to allow for more to be added?
Using unreadable, terse and rushed code to get things out the door
quickly doesn’t mean you are more effective. It means you will get into
trouble later on. The maintainability of your code is the most important
part to think about and you can only do that while you write it. “Get this
out now, we can clean it up later” is as much of a lie as agreeing that “I
have read the full terms and conditions.” Build for the person who takes
over from you, not for the current state of the browser and you’ll be a great
person to work with.iT’S noT abouT whaT You Can aDD,
iT’S abouT whaT we Can’T TaKe awaY
Basic functionality should always be there.
A curious thing about software is that it is fallible.
We, who are excited about it, are prone to forget that. Using a fancy
MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework to build a single-page app with
incredibly clean separation of back-end tasks is a tempting thing to do. Af-
ter all, this is what the cool kids do and what Google and others, who have
to scale to infinity and beyond, use.
We get very excited about adding new features to our products be-
cause we see them used elsewhere and we are bored with building the
same solutions year after year. It can feel like we’re not progressing and,
more importantly, it feels weird that almost nothing we learn in comput-
er science courses at university can be applied once we take a job in Web
development.