Re: Couple of beginner questions

Peter Ford wrote:

Paul M Foster wrote: (snip)

But here's a question for those of you who work in a collaborative environment-- are you really ever in a situation where some HTML weenie is coding HTML pages and you're somewhere else doing the PHP work? Or is that some academic's view of the way things *should* be done? Paul

Yup, been there in a mid-sized web agency a few years ago, although with Java/JSP rather than PHP. The sensitive types drew the pretty pictures on their Macs, passed the design to the HTML hackers who broke the pretty pictures into sprawling arrays of table cells and image fragments, then passed the HTML to the Java teams (me and others) who had to slot in the logic without spoiling the pretty pictures. Then the sensitive types would see a pixel out of place and the HTML hackers would have to carefully navigate the logic sections and tweak the tables to make it look right again. It certainly focuses the mind about separating logic and presentation. In the end most of the JSP was done with JSP tag libraries, so that the HTML hackers were not too distracted by scary Java code. It actually all worked quite well, and produced some really beautiful web sites AND really elegant code libraries. But then the dot-com thing all fell over and it was too expensive for most people to pay for three teams and a couple of managers just to build a web shop...

think you've hit on something there; when I'm not coding in php I'm coding in java; which has a very strong focus on code seperation and using certain architectures / design patterns; it's hard not to cary this over to php and other languages once you've started doing it - as you say it leads to "really beautiful web sites AND really elegant code libraries" at the same time though there's the time/effort/cost factors and often it's not efficient or cost effective in any way to knock up a perfectly coded application for a small-mid sized site. Not that stops me trying / picking & choosing the work which allows me the freedom to code "properly" ooh, worth noting that using flex as a front end almost by nature forces you to use an mvc/3-tier/n-tier architecture :) makes coding much more enjoyable.