sanity: none;
I’ve long since given up writing for the masses. It’s really hard to gain popular appeal with “HOW TO INSTALL WORDPRESS”, when everyone else is writing about the same thing.
So after a couple of years I started to write about technical subjects instead of “Keyword” popular issues. The reason for the switch was I was already doing a great deal of technical writing, but only for myself, squirreled away in so many “Word” documents, so that I might refer back to my notes when I encountered a similar issue I had already faced in previous work.
Lacking the time to compose popular posts for pennies on the dollar, I decided to release some of my notes to fill in the gaps of my blogs and I’ve been employing this type of technique to my writing ever since. Less pennies on the dollar!
However, I’ve moved from tech issues to what you would term commentary for lack of a better term. Mostly, because what tech issues I was writing about would change so entirely, so quickly as to render what I had written useless to most anyone including myself. Lesser pennies on the dollar!!!
Most of my writing is pretty strange ( i ) must admit. This post is no different. So unless you are actually part of the UX/UI crowd, it might be hard to grasp, especially for my clients.
I would imagine that most of my readers fall in two categories; clients, and IT folks. This post is really for the latter, you’re going to love this one …
I was working on a quick client request to insert visual links to his vendors when I was ambushed by a rouge group of CSS attributes masquerading as “HTML Inline Styling“.
Consider the following code:
<!– Grid List –><!–START VENDORS–>
<div class=”grid-list”>
<div class=”row margin-none”>
<!– Grid Col –>
<div class=”col-lg-3 col-md-4 col-sm-6 col-xs-12 padding-none“>
<!– Grid Box –>
<div class=”grid-box”>
<a href=”#”><img src=”images/client-1.png” class=”img-full” alt=”Client Name”></a>
</div>
<!– Grid Box End –>
</div>
<!– Grid Col End –>
For those in the know, what you are looking at is part of the “bootstrap framework“. Notice in the fifth line at the end of that line, the words “padding-none” highlighted in bold.
As I did not write this section of code I never caught the “padding-none” as a “CLASS”. And yes, I can read, however, I’ve been trained to SEE it as “HTML Inline Styling”.
Sorting through nearly 7000 lines of Bootstrap CSS is not my idea of a high time. However, I had to find out why in the world my CSS styling for my paddings was having no effect … and it all started with the nearly 7000 lines of Bootstrap CSS in “MIN” compressed formatting no less. What’s worse I actually wanted the paddings set to none!
Nearly ten hours and a couple of different sit downs later, I finally realized “padding-none” was being used as a “CLASS” and not an “INLINE STYLE”.
Oh shit … I’ve never seen that done ever, anyway, anyhow in all my years and millions of lines of code that I have worked with. WTF … talk about bad form!!!
If the “CLASS” had been labeled “padding-special” or “padding-specific” or something along those lines I would have immediately picked it up as a “CLASS” and not an “INLINE STYLE” attribute.
I guess that’s why they have two pilots in the cockpit so that they can work as a team to spot potential problems. That said; it’s a good thing I wasn’t flying the plane!!!
