James Carr

Just came across this little surprise on Refactoring HTML while browsing Martin Fowler’s site today… got to say I’m both surprised and not surprised a book like this came out.

First off not surprised since refactoring HTML is fairly common. A lot of times with legacy sites I find myself doing “Replace Presentational Table With Semantic Markup and CSS” (dunno if it’s in the book, I just made it up) refactorings all the time. Also taking display related HTML and breaking it into more semantical markup is a common strategy I’ve done… as well as applying microformats.

Surprised because I guess it’s a daring book to write for the crowd that consumes the Martin Fowler Signature Series books. From my experience the majority of Java, Ruby, and .NET folks usually pay no heed to HTML… they either delegate this task to a designer or dump a bunch of slop (like a table to center some text) that “just works” while focusing on the back end code. These are the same types you’ll find dropping self closing BR tags in HTML 4.01 documents or being clueless about what a doctype actually is. ARGHHH!!! (I’ll stop ranting)

Anyhow, I’m definitely queuing this one up and checking it out. Maybe I’ll find some new useful strategies for cleaning up stinky, fragile HTML.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 1:54 am and is filed under Web UI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.