If there is one thing that I feel can be best learned from programming for the internet it’s modularity.  Programmers preach modularity through encapsulation and design models but ultimately sometimes it’s really easy to just throw in a hacky fix and be done with the whole mess.  Welcome to the “I need this fix last week” school of code updating.  Honestly, that kind of thing happens to the best of us.

Being that I am a web developer, specifically working in an interpreted language, there are two ways that things can go, clean, neat and easy to manage or a horribly mangled mess.  My first couple of full-scale projects on the web were more of the latter and less of the former.  I cobbled things together any way that worked within the time frame that I was given.  Ultimately this meant little to me at the time, but for the people that are maintaining the code now…  I am terribly sorry.  Fortunately, I know the poor sap that is currently updating the code so he has a resource to cut through the thick undergrowth of spaghetti.

I have a particular project that I work on every so often. It’s actually kind of a meta-project as I have to maintain a web-based project queue and management system, so it is a project for the sake of projects. Spiffy eh? Anyway, I haven’t had this thing break in a while which either means that I did such a nice, robust job of coding the darn thing that it is unbreakable (sure it is) or more likely, nobody has pushed this thing to the breaking point. Given enough time and enough monkeys. All of that aside, every so often, my boss comes up with new things that she would like the system to do, and I have to build them in. Fortunately, I built it in such a way that most everything just kind of “plugs in” not so much that I have an API and whatnot, but rather, I can simply build out a module and then just run an include and use it. Neat, isn’t it?

So, today I was told that she really wanted to be able to update team members on a project and then update the status of said users. Now, the way the thing works is you update the list of team members on a project and then edit the project again to set the status. This is a little cumbersome, we’ve discovered, simply because we don’t use the system the way we thought we would. Isn’t this always the case? So, my boss specifically, goes and toys with the team members as she is working on a project. This is dandy, except that she has to update the team and then go find the project again, right away. Not so good. What she asked for is a way to update the team and then immediately update the status of any given member of the new team list.

Happy new year! Going into the start of the new year, I have a project that has carried over from the moment I started my current job. I am working on the information architecture and interaction design of a web-based insurance tool. Something that I have run into recently is a document structure that was developed using XML containers. This, in and of itself, is not an issue. XML is a wonderful tool for dividing information up in a useful way. The problem lies in how the system is implemented. This, my friends, is where I ran into trouble with a particular detail in this project. Call it the proverbial bump in the road.

Generally speaking, when dealing with a database like one I use a lot, MySQL, you can run queries to retrieve data in any way you like. So long as the basic design is reasonably flexible, you can return anything you want. Apparently this isn’t so with the XML structure that was used on my current project. People would ask, ‘why is this a problem?’ On the outset it doesn’t seem like it would be. You figure out how you want to return the data and then you simply structure the XML containers appropriately. Great! Now along I come and I say, ‘this model stinks. The usability is nonexistent and we want to change the structure.’ Now what?

Something that I have learnt over time is how to make your site accessible for people that don’t have your perfect 20/20 vision, are working from a limited environment or just generally have old browsing capabilities. Believe it or not, people that visit my web sites still use old computers with old copies of Windows. Personally, I have made the Linux switch everywhere I can. That being said, I spend a certain amount of time surfing the web using Lynx. This is not due to the fact that I don’t have a GUI in Linux. I do. And I use firefox for my usual needs, but Lynx has a certain special place in my heart. It is in a class of browser that sees the web in much the same way that a screen reader does. For example, all of those really neat iframes that you use for dynamic content? Yeah, those come up as “iframe.” Totally unreadable. Totally unreachable. Iframe is an example of web technology that is web-inaccessible. Translate this as bad news.

Let’s talk about HTML and XHTML. These are both derivatives of SGML which is a generalized markup language that is used to describe data. That’s it. SGML doesn’t make things “look” a certain way. You won’t find it hanging around the local bar trying to pick up girls. It’s just data description. Kind of geeky, like that kid that sits in the back of class playing with his… calculator. So, then HTML was developed with it’s own DTDso that people could describe the information contained in their HTML documents.  Early HTML was easy to interpret if it was coded well, however most people are sloppy with their code.  This led the W3C to create a code validator.  Now, based on the DTD that you use your document may be standards complient or it may not.  Personally I really like to stay within the bounds of strict XHTML, though onMouseOver is deprecated, so Javascript kind of hoses the whole complience thing.

By this I don’t mean that you should fill every pixel on the screen with text, information and blinking, distracting graphics. What I really mean is that you should give yourself more time to accomplish what you are looking to do on the web. Sure, your reaction to this is going to be “duh, of course you should spend time thinking about what you are going to do online. All good jobs take time.” I say, oh young one, are you actually spending time where it needs to be spent? I suspect you aren’t.

First to the hard-core graphic designers in the crowd: Just because you spent extra time looking online through iStockPhoto finding that perfect picture does NOT mean that your design will encourage even one new customer. When it comes down to it, your average web user doesn’t care what your design looks like. It should fit the theme of the product being sold and the tone should be appropriate, but they really don’t care if you use one perfectly appropriate graphic or another. The nuance is generally totally lost. If you are going to consume days or even weeks coming up with that perfect design, it better slap my dad’s dentures right out of his head and make him spend 50% more than he otherwise would. If this isn’t the case, the ROI on those last few days or weeks that you spent is going to be painfully low. Think “solution” not “pretty.” Spend you time actually solving your customer’s problem.

Being that this was an issue just last evening, I thought I would share something that I have encountered when writing Javascript scripts.  First of all, let me state that Javascript syntax is extremely forgiving.  You can do all kinds of  unorthodox declarations of variables as well as use variables in all kinds of strange ways.  You can take a variable, store a string in it, then a number, then an object and then back again.  Weakly typed would be the gaming phrase.  The one thing that I would like to note, as it was my big issue last evening, is scope of your variables.  So long as you are careful about defining the scope of any given variable then you are ok, if not, you could have a problem just like I did.  So, let’s start with scope and how it works.

Scope: A mouthwash.  Yep.  There you have it.  Brush and floss every day and you’ll be a better programmer.

That’s useless.

Scope: In computer programming in general, a scope is an enclosing context.