Lessons from Web App Dev 101
Posted on October 6th, 2008 | by dade |One tenets of good design is separation of concerns; being able to identify the different parts to a problem, break them into distinct features that overlap in functionality as little as possible, such that it will be possible to use the appropriate problem solving tools accordingly. It also means building the different part of a system using the recommended tools. This not only makes problem solving or task completion much more intuitive, it also makes for easier management of projects.
This design principle finds its place in Web application development. In Client side development where you may have a myriad of technologies, which may falsely appear to substitute one another, to contend with, it is always a good thing to stick with these design principles:
· Separate Contents from Styling Information: web design101 tells me so; content and document structure differs from formatting so I shouldn’t mix the two together. So I use CSS.
· Separate text contents from image contents: in my little time in the wild, I have seen interesting things: things like a website in its entirety being made up of nothing but JPG files. This is not only ineffective, it is dumb. It shouldn’t be forgotten that on the web, other beings, apart from humans pay visit to our sites: web crawlers etc. I wonder how a JPG based web page hopes to attain content visibility to a search engine.
· Separate content from behavior: this design principle is often referred to as unobtrusive Javascript. Just as it pays to segregate content from styling information. More so it pays to separate content from behavioral properties. Putting it in another way, all your Javascript codes must move out from within the <body/> tag into the <script/> tag
