Re: Re: PHP programming strategy

On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 21:49 +1000, Clancy wrote: > Thank you to all of you who have commented on this query. > > On the subject of comments, I feel that Larry Garfield settled this query by pointing out > that halving the size of a particular document gave a barely noticeable increase in speed. > Paul Foster pointed out the problem of maintenance, but if, as I do, you do your > development in-house, and then upload the working copies of the program, it would be > possible to strip out comments when you upload it. If you were really paranoid, this could > have the advantage that if somebody managed to steal your code from the server it would be > that much harder for them to understand. On the other hand the process of stripping out > the comments could potentially introduce new bugs, and I think this consideration would > outweigh anything else. > > I have recently come to the conclusion that I should never consider anything completed > until I have analysed the HTML code for an actual page. It is amazing how badly mangled > tables and the like can be without producing any visible effect on the page, and on > several occasions I have found PHP error messages which were mixed up with the HTML in > such a way that they were not displayed at all. On at least one occasion this gave me the > clue to an otherwise baffling bug. > > I have also discovered that the process of analysing the HTML is made substantially > simpler by inserting HTML comments into the output; e.g. instead of > > Echo '</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>'; > write > ?> > </td></tr></table> > <!-End of table 2 ' > > </td></tr></table> > <!-End of table 1 ' > > Unfortunately, for HTML readability, it is highly desirable not to indent the code, and if > you are trying to have nicely indented braces, this makes the PHP code that much harder to > interpret. > > And on the question of functions there is some virtue (primarily from the point of view of > maintenance) in not having individual files too large, so while it seems to be the general > consensus that splitting up functions into groups to give smaller files will probably slow > things down a bit, if they can be grouped into sets which are only loaded in particular > circumstances this would be worth doing. > > Nested tables are the devils playthings! Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk