I am in the middle of a project where I am combining two sources of old school code, one really bad rat’s nest of code (that has gotten much better thanks to the counterpart who I am working with) and the other just remnants of the old school bad.

The reason I bring this up is the fact I am becoming a bit of a code snob. Ugly, sloppy code really grosses me out. There was some code pulled up on a projector today and I had to turn away. So when did this happen for me?

I was introduced to the wonderful world of CSS about two years ago now. Before that I was building sites like everyone else, tables and spacer gifs. I can completely understand the necessity of those means before CSS came along, but now I can’t bear to work like that. Seperating design and content is essential to get past any sort of design changes one has to a multipaged website.

Thought One - Applications.

One thing that I have come to find over the last few years of being a “professional,” is that I am not so good at writing my own application code (working on that with rails, but more on that another time), but I am good at changing the look and feel of others. So what does that make me? A good skinner. And I am cool with that by the way.

So when I come across an application I want to work with, a blog or cms platform, and the code it generates is dated and ugly, I become a bit turned off to the whole idea of spending the time to learn it. Case in point: Joomla!. What a great CMS for cookie cutter websites. They have tables and other useless stuff so engrossed throughout the code, the idea of building beautiful, unique, thoughtful websites becomes extremely difficult. After two weeks of pulling my hair out trying to figure out Joomla! and delete all of it’s unecessary html code in the php, I switched to CMS Made Simple. These guys have it figured out and I was able to get done in one day, what I hadn’t been able to do in two weeks with Joomla!. Mixing html inside of your application code is a bad idea. And if you want to attract us standards guys, mixing table cells and server-side scripting is a especially bad idea.

Now all I have to do is break it to the guy who writes my checks that I had to make a call.

Thought Two - Consistency

I pat myself on the back everytime I see a valid xhtml or css link on someone’s page. It will be ok, eventually all of us will get in line with this whole thing. What the standards link tells me is this: not only will I be able to go in and change the whole page around with CSS, but they probably aren’t using tables and spacer gifs either.

In fact, I would go as far as saying their code probably looks a lot like mine. Begins with: <div id=”container”> and goes through the list of identifying everything with id’s and classes? What’s the point? The point is when the majority of the web developers start going down this path, a very important consistency emerges.

Thought Three - The Future

I have gone from hacking websites together to building websites built for the future. This entails a few things.

1) Build websites with the intention of coming back and editing it in five years. Yes, some things will change, but there will be a consistency to your work.

2) Build websites with the intention that someone will be editing it in five years. I can’t stress this enough. I work at an agency and our team just got on the same page about building sites (file structures, naming schemes, css practices, html practices) the same. This doesn’t have to be one man to rule them all, it just needs to pull from everyone’s best practices.

3) Look at the greats in this field; Shaun Inman, John Hicks, Veerle Pieters, and Cameron Moll only to name a few, see how they code, see how they design. My first portfolio pulled heavily from John Hicks, as to say, I killed cats or something to that extent. These people really have a feel for what is good.

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Being a code snob is a good thing, but one must always remember, they are never quite there. Always learning. Always paying attention.

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