Traditional developers vs. web developers vs. CSS

Morten Krog

10/17/2006 9:12:23 PM #

Kinda wierd distinction, isn't it? Are you talking about software developer who also does some web-design or designers who also do some programming?

Programming as a discipline is not really rooted in either web-site development or desktop application development. It is the same discipline no matter where.

If you talk about programmers and not designers (as I suppose you do) I must add that the example you show seems very unrealistic too me. It is usually no problem for anyone to use border: <value> rather than the border-left-etc. No, the place where most non-designers fails is remembering the order of the parameters and thus they default to border-width: 1px; border-style: solid and so forth.

If you continue the trend of what makes me twitch, then I usually use the example where a web-designer attempts to write a multithreaded desktop-gui application. It is very rare indeed that they get that right.

Btw. it is annoying that you are not allowed to post comments containing the less-than or greater-than sign.

Jesper

10/18/2006 7:06:33 AM #

Ever noticed that you can also tell if the programmer is an educated programmer or a engineer? I've worked with quite a few engineers and their style of coding very recognizable too. I'm all for quick 'n' dirty at times, when properly commented, but engineers tend to do almost nothing but quick 'n' dirty.

Pelle

10/18/2006 9:40:53 AM #

Guess where I found:
.siteName a {
  font-weight: bold;
  font-size: 80px;
  color: White;
  letter-spacing: 5px;
}

What kind of code would this be according to your own distinction? ;)

Wayne

10/18/2006 2:34:32 PM #

I'm confused as to which one makes you twitch.  As a web programmer, I find myself using both types of notation depending on the situation.  If all borders are the same, then I simply use "border".  If any of them are different, then I'll separate them out.

It also depends on the context of what I'm coding for.  In my personal stuff, I tend to use a lot of shortcut notations.  When I'm writing something that someone else - who might not have the same level of CSS experience that I do - may have to maintain, I tend to make it a little clearer as to what's going on by using the individual notations.

Also, while traditional programmers may have had to shift towards web development a bit, web developers have had to shift towards traditional programming also.  When I first started doing web stuff, there was markup.  Then there was scripting like ASP / PHP.  Now I use full OOP in both PHP and ASP.NET.  I think the lines between "traditional programmer" and "web programmer" have blurred a bit.

Kris Brixon

10/18/2006 3:08:18 PM #

The traditional vs web developer makes sense.

The traditional developer started from the position where their program generally had one CPU per user and a lot of RAM for that one user.

The web developer started from the position of shared hosting where bandwidth was expensive and did not want to waste MB's on extra characters, shared hosting also meant shared CPU and shared RAM.

Bryan Peters

10/18/2006 3:10:58 PM #

I think a lot of ugly CSS is due to WYSIWYG editors out there.  Even the better ones will do this.   I really doubt that kind of code is typed out by hand because minute someone start coding their own CSS, they will look at someone else's CSS and realize there's a better way to do it.  If they never figure out how to view someone else's CSS then they're stuck in the WYSIWYG stone age of CSS, and that's just a shame.

Johnny

10/20/2006 8:00:38 PM #

what about those of us that like to use all the white space to the right???

.container {height:100px;width:100px;background:#333 url('bg.gif') repeat-x top left;}

what do you call us???  efficient?