Entries published on June 21, 2008
Things I have learned about XHTML
The following are gleaned from the comments to my recent explanation of why I chose to use HTML 4.01 Strict for my redesign, rather than a flavor of XHTML, an explanation in which I mostly boiled the debate — for my needs, here on this site — down to “XHTML doesn’t offer me any compelling advantage, and it’s more complex to do right than most people know/admit”.
Advance warning: yes, this is snarky and is going to make fun of uninformed comments. Yes, I do think it’s necessary to call people out on this kind of thing. Yes, if …
Let’s talk about documentation
One of the most active threads on reddit’s programming section right now discusses things people look for when reviewing someone else’s code; the article being discussed treats this as a great interview question and points to things like algorithm choices and object-oriented design as good responses. While these are important considerations, I’ve found I tend to make snap judgments long before I get to that level of analysis, and they’re almost always based on one key factor: documentation.
Of course, I have the luxury of mostly reviewing Python code, and Python makes it ridiculously easy to embed useful documentation. What’s more, …