You know, standards are good, and clean code is very good. But for some of us (myself included), we need to separate ourselves from our theoretical “perfect world” and come back to reality: Sometimes abiding perfectly to standards can be very detrimental to our real-world development, whether it be application performance or developer time that are impacted.

Either way, we can’t always blame the developer for poor performance. True, developing to standards will slow you down at first, and bad implementation of standards-based code can cause poor application performance, but sometimes we need to listen to our common sense and just break the rules.

It was comforting to see that Ryan Campbell agrees with me on this point in his article Breaking the Rules over at Particletree.

Just because this is true, however, doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of times when developers make a bad choice and break the rules for the wrong reason, whether it be laziness, ignorance, etc. Standards-based coding in the real world can be a tricky thing, requiring excellent balance and judgment.