August 10^th, 2010

Perfectionism in Web Development

I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist with my code. Be it HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript or PHP, I always keep things as neat as possible and follow the rules available to me.

When writing a website from scratch, most of the developers I’ve worked with will always take the shortest, easiest methods.  Images are quickly cut and saved, CSS is written out as part of the header, Javascript is written haphazardly across the body, generated XML is written as a single line, HTML is indented poorly if at all…  These are the things that drive me absolutely crazy.  What’s worse, many times these sites will not display accurately in browsers other then a particular version of Internet Explorer, and because everything is so haphazardly strewn about, it sometimes takes longer to fix the code so it displays correctly in other browsers then it did to write the thing in the first place!

Before I call a website complete, I have a mental checklist I run through.

1. Does the site pass the W3C validator?
2. Does the site pass the W3C CSS Validator?
3. Is all Javascript contained within the header?
   (Extra credit: Is it all in one included file?)
4. Is all CSS contained within included CSS files?
   (Extra credit: Is it all in one included file?)
5. Are all images in formats that enable the lowest file size?
6. Does the site look identical in all browsers?

This is of course not complete- but more a basic list that ensures you avoid the problems listed above.  There are a number of sites which provide fantastic lists for what to check before finishing your project;  The best I’ve seen so far is Launchlist, which gives you a very verbose and logical place to start from, and lets you add your own to it if they missed anything.

If only more people followed these rules, we’d avoid the issues caused by “Internet Explorer Only” websites.