Is coding going over the top and overly complicated? Create code that matters

OK, the computer Science Education Week is coming to an end – hope you’ve had fun.

Of course, the coding doesn’t have to stop! – keep building, testing, refining – make something that makes a difference!

Lets look at something I have seen rather a lot of over this week, and in my mind at least, relates to lack of proper planning and getting caught up with bells-and-whistles
– Elegant solutions come from planning

I know people, read: designers, are looking to an ‘assembled web’, where everything is created by libraries and plugins.

Not picking on anyone, I just happen to see this example, and being my personal bugbear, not everyone enjoys high-speed Internet access everywhere
– so why overload pages with redundant weight (and ‘garbage’)?
– especially when it comes down fancy bells & whistles/ eye-candy?

Just try it over a dial-up modem connection .. and dont be so arrogant.

Side-chat over ..

You certainly wont learn coding doing this ‘assembly’ stuff idea

ZURB reports loading Facebook, Twitter, Google share widgets took 19 HTTP requests & added 246.7KB to a page’s weight

250KB is a few thousand words that actually say (and mean) something, or maybe 5 pictures (that maybe dont). More design sophisticated for sure, but the web is becoming so visual, something that no-one reads any more. For me, that’s sad
– the number of sites that take me ages to work out what the company or product actually does, how it works, just gets me down. It looks pretty and the message is getting lost.

Some say a picture is worth a thousand words – yeah, depending on the picture. And I can read a 1000 word summary on the Mona Lisa faster than most ordinary mortals (and me) could decipher the hidden qualities studying the picture .. I digress.

Back to the point. For example: letting.js, a jQuery library, spotted on CreativeBlog: Polyfills

<script>
$(document).ready(function() {
$(“.fancy_title”).lettering();
});
</script>

(remember to write the code to embed the jQuery and the letting plugin as well)
– the idea is you then manually adjust the CSS for each .char#, adding salt according to taste ..
– outputing this HTML

<h1 class=“fancy_title”>
S
o
m
e

T
i
t
l
e
</h1>

So, since you are such an ace coder, why not just code the classes in the first place?
– a simple JS loop would ‘document.write’ this without clutter
– or, Heaven forbid, just write the HTML (h1-)heading – how often is it going to change anyway?