Code is very dry, and for the most part, uninteresting to read in large quantities on a blog. For the most part, blog posts consisting of a lot of code just end up being blindly copied and pasted by someone scouring the web looking for the specific css they need. How do I know this? I do it- all the time. Yet, when I was looking for a guide to making columns in css I found the amazing blog A List Apart, whose quirky sketches and almost philosophical writing immediately caught my eye.
A List Apart presents practical, thematic css guides, giving the user a general set of rules and inspiration to use in their web pages, rather than a simple index of terms. Their guide to columns and page layouts describes how the proportions of the divs on a page define the page's tone and give it character.
It's also clear that they understand what is key in a website, because their website is easily maneuverable and manages to avoid being overwhelming, despite consisting mostly of giant masses of text.
This fluid and satisfying design philosophy is something I hope to bring into not only my projects, but also my code. As our UIL database project becomes larger and larger, it is crucial to effectively comment and manage the code- avoiding things such as 1000 line long route files and enormous blocks of CSS. But this is not as easy as splitting as splitting files into more javascript files with mildly descriptive filenames- for this only pushes the problem to the app.js file, forcing us to balance many more route files. So what is the solution? I have no idea, really. For now I'll consult The Pragmatic Programmer and maybe Code Complete.
