Comments on: CSS Drives Me Nuts! http://www.patrickkphillips.com/2009/11/21/css-drives-me-nuts/ Thoughts on TV, Double Standards and Bad Grammar Since 2004 Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:12:49 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Mika http://www.patrickkphillips.com/2009/11/21/css-drives-me-nuts/comment-page-1/#comment-11041 Mika Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:14:28 +0000 http://www.patrickkphillips.com/?p=8809#comment-11041 Yeah, I hear ya. I do web design intermittently, but only for people or companies that I already know, or know someone who works for them. I don't charge much, but in turn, I also do not avail myself to wait on hand and foot on their every whim. I ask them questions to determine what they need, build a site based on those needs and some room for expandability, and I do not do content production - they provide the text and the images and all that junk. In most cases I don't involve them in the process much at all, I may ask them what colors they prefer etc, but in the end I trust my own instinct in terms of design and usability a lot more than I do them. Sometimes people ask for things like custom mouse cursors or other junk that has questionable cross-browser support and makes the page load slower, and I just tell them outright that I recommend against it. I could never do that kind of work as a 9-to-5 thing. On a project by project basis on a discount for people I know, sure. But for clueless companies with massive senses of entitlement, nah. Most design suggestions coming from people with zero web design experience under their belt are, plainly put, bad ideas. Yeah, I hear ya. I do web design intermittently, but only for people or companies that I already know, or know someone who works for them. I don’t charge much, but in turn, I also do not avail myself to wait on hand and foot on their every whim. I ask them questions to determine what they need, build a site based on those needs and some room for expandability, and I do not do content production – they provide the text and the images and all that junk. In most cases I don’t involve them in the process much at all, I may ask them what colors they prefer etc, but in the end I trust my own instinct in terms of design and usability a lot more than I do them. Sometimes people ask for things like custom mouse cursors or other junk that has questionable cross-browser support and makes the page load slower, and I just tell them outright that I recommend against it.

I could never do that kind of work as a 9-to-5 thing. On a project by project basis on a discount for people I know, sure. But for clueless companies with massive senses of entitlement, nah. Most design suggestions coming from people with zero web design experience under their belt are, plainly put, bad ideas.

]]> By: Diana http://www.patrickkphillips.com/2009/11/21/css-drives-me-nuts/comment-page-1/#comment-11025 Diana Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:39:07 +0000 http://www.patrickkphillips.com/?p=8809#comment-11025 What Mika said is so very true, comment everything! I used to design web sites and I found that there is very little money in it and the customer wants everything for free. One customer I had to explain to her what a web browser, what font types were and I just gave up designing web sites CSS drove me me nuts. What Mika said is so very true, comment everything!
I used to design web sites and I found that there is very little money in it and the customer wants everything for free. One customer I had to explain to her what a web browser, what font types were and I just gave up designing web sites

CSS drove me me nuts.

]]> By: Mika http://www.patrickkphillips.com/2009/11/21/css-drives-me-nuts/comment-page-1/#comment-11021 Mika Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:55:45 +0000 http://www.patrickkphillips.com/?p=8809#comment-11021 People who code in C/variants, Delphi, Perl etc very soon learn that the unwritten rule of coding is "comment everything." Scrolling through thousands or even millions of lines of code is invigorating enough without having no in-line commentary to help you find what you're looking for. It is therefore interesting to me that stylesheets, which by their very purpose are supposed to be flexible and frequently edited, quite often have no commentary at all. Considering how large stylesheets can get for scripts like Wordpress, combing through them for that one specific variable isn't my idea of a day in the park, either. People who code in C/variants, Delphi, Perl etc very soon learn that the unwritten rule of coding is “comment everything.” Scrolling through thousands or even millions of lines of code is invigorating enough without having no in-line commentary to help you find what you’re looking for.

It is therefore interesting to me that stylesheets, which by their very purpose are supposed to be flexible and frequently edited, quite often have no commentary at all. Considering how large stylesheets can get for scripts like Wordpress, combing through them for that one specific variable isn’t my idea of a day in the park, either.

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