Breaking the Rules
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.
April 10th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Yea, I agree in some instances you have to break the rules. The standards are not yet fully flushed out to deal with all necessary circumstances. As XHTML progresses more closely to XML standards, I think that this will be a thing of the past.
ALA posted an article that made me think of this. There needs to be stateful identifiers in XHTML, which is where these non-semantic ids and classes are coming from - an attempt to give state. With these proposed additions of a “role” attribute, non-semantic rules will lessen!
April 12th, 2007 at 7:01 am
And by then, the web will evolve and the standard will be inadequate in some other way. We must let go of the “perfect world” hope in technology.
And this is a programming issue in general, not just a web development issue. Sticking to standards and best practices benefits you in ways you can’t even foresee sometimes, but there’s a reason standards are called standards and not laws, and “best” practices not “perfect” practices. Both will always be in a state of flux because we humans just can’t hit the nail just right for something so potentially complicated as application and systems design.
AND recognize that the standards evolve slowly. In the real world, we don’t have time to wait. All that said, the further beautification and modernization of XHTML is welcome.