Let’s start our discussion with a funny gif. I blieve it sums up the purpose of this blog post pretty well.
CSS is very powerful. It’s what gives us the pretty web. But unfortunately, like a lot of other powerful technologies, it can be easily abused. When it is written badly, the severity of the consequence can range from confusing code to next-to-impossibe maintenance or modification of software.
Last fall I gave a talk to a software engineering class at OSU CompSci dept about learning to learn in this day and age, and also gave them a beginner level introduction to web development. I received pretty positive feedback from the students and the professor, Dr. Samadzadeh. I want to share it here in case anyone else finds it helpful.
Writing code for UI is hard and time-consuming. Therefore, it’s worth the time and effort to talk about what we can do to improve the process of converting specs to actual UIs. Trust me, time spent upfront on understanding the UI specs is time well spent. I’ve been writing (mostly web) UI code for many years now, and have had to learn the hard way some valuable lessons. I want to share some of my thoughts here in hope that it might help others.