I recently purchased a style template for a pre-built web application. Sure saves a lot of time and money.
But in every project, tinkering is a must to make it “just-so” for the audience it’s intended for. And that means tweaking the templates and style sheets (CSS). As I tweaked this template, it occurred to me that tinkering can be disasterous unless you intimately know what’s going on in the developer’s mind.
So developers, unless you are trying to corner the market on updates, follow these rules when developing global templates and I’ll be your customer again and again:
1. Thou shalt separate coding for retrieving and presenting data.
Work smarty (engine) not harder.
2. Thou shalt use cascading style sheets for design
Don’t use style tags and don’t use embedded styles in each page.
3. Thou shalt not use inline styles
Don’t make styling changes in individual HTML elements. Use classes and ID constructors and make changes in the style sheet.
4. Thou shalt separate global CSS from module specific CSS.
Don’t make me plod through gigantic style sheets to find the one entry for a specific page.
5. Thou shalt test CSS in at least 3 browsers
Don’t wow me in Google Chrome just to find out it stinks in MSIE.
