Real World HTML with Marcus Alexander -
Posted on by Steve Workman About 1 min reading time
This month, Marcus Alexander of EMC Consulting and Arran Ross-Paterson (of this parish) talk about HTML in the real world, dealing with clients, and what a quality project actually looks like.
Everything is designed that way for a reason Semantic HTML may be brilliant, but all those extra bits are in there for a reason. Until you understand them, don't mess with them
The best solution is the one that meets the requirements Clients don't really care about the technology, just about getting things done on time and on budget. If a solution meets all the requirements, it doesn't matter how hacky it is, it's the right solution.
Ask the right questions up front The client may not have thought of everything, so go through your standard checklist of questions and get everything agreed before you start.
Bugs happen, deal with it 100 bugs in a project is normal, most of them will be problems with other people's code. Deal with them and try not to let the client get carried away. Products will ship with bugs, just deal with them.
Developers will build a rocket ship to get to Ikea And then they'll only leave room in the rocket for a hot dog and some light bulbs. Internal coding standards aren't very useful, try code reviews and examples of structure instead.
Deployment scripts are your friend They do all the grunt work for a release for you. Make use of ANT or MSBuild to speed things up.
Finally, thanks to Marcus for a great talk. Update: his slides are on slideshare: http://slidesha.re/980xv4 See my notes on this meetup's other talk: Arran Ross-Paterson on Why validate