Josh Holmes recently posted his presentation “The Lost Art of Simplicity”. As a consultant, I am frequently striving for simplicity for one main reason: I leave behind the code I create. Most of the time I leave the code behind to be maintained by some other developer that works for the client. So I am right there with what Josh is advocating. I wouldn’t want to be the guy trying to figure out some overly-complicated code 6 months down the line (I have been that guy before).
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So here on my current project is anti-simplicity in action. The app is an ASP.NET app. There is a “toolbar” of sorts specific for the page. One of the toolbar “buttons” is simply a link to find more products. The “toolbar” is hosted in a user control. The developer coded this link as an ASP Linkbutton. The linkbutton has a server-side event handler to capture the click, which it then propagates outside the user control so the container control can get the click event. The hosting control then captures the event and does a redirect to a hard-coded URL. There is zero conditional logic in all the code. What happened to an HTML <A> tag? There is absolutely no reason for any server processing on this action at all! I can only fathom the reasons the developer did this:
- There are other buttons that act that way, so all buttons should act that way
- He’s proud of complex code and solutions
- Because he can
- He thinks it’s more secure, hiding the url?
In the end, the developer has forgotten why he is on the project. We are creating software for the client. This includes leaving them with something that has a lower maintenance cost by achieving simplicity.
On a related note, the UI/designers on this project are 100% anti-tables. I understand using CSS for layouts and not tables, I’m all on board with that. But using UL lists stacked next to one another to display tabular data is just wrong. Tables are part of the HTML spec for a reason, mainly tabular data. Because developers/designers perverted the use of tables in the past does not preclude their ultimate use in a solution. Zealotry is another anti-simplicity pattern in my world.
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