Design - one name, one action

"When you're designing a piece of code, or a web page, or you're putting together an image, always keep one logical action or piece of work in one file or one named block. If you want to do several things, then write an encompassing element to contain them both."

Such is Computer Science Theory, but what does it mean, and why? Let me give you an example.

On the left hand side of our web page, we have an image that's 132 pixels wide by 300 pixels tall, and until the current version of our site it also included a band of 8 white pixels on the right to space the text in. Great - the site worked very well. Until we came to add in colour changes required under the UK's Disability Discrimination Act. Then we saw an ugly white line to the right of the image on all non-standard pages and had to make retrospective changes.

Had we used two images in a table to start with, "one image, one function", then not only would that problem have been solved, but also we could have made use of the images for other purposes. I'm glad to say that's done on the new site, which is why you can see images of Lisa and I to the sides of this page - great reuse of work and THAT's what allows us to do so much with such a small team!

(written 2005-12-19 09:21:28)

Associated topics are indexed under

Q907 - Object Orientation and General technical topics - Object Orientation: Design Techniques
  [2523] Plan your application before you start - (2009-12-02)
  [2501] Simples - (2009-11-12)
  [2380] Object Oriented programming - a practical design example - (2009-08-27)
  [2327] Planning! - (2009-08-08)
  [2170] Designing a heirarcy of classes - getting inheritance right - (2009-05-11)
  [2169] When should I use OO techniques? - (2009-05-11)
  [1538] Teaching Object Oriented Java with Students and Ice Cream - (2008-02-12)
  [1528] Object Oriented Tcl - (2008-02-02)
  [1435] Object Oriented Programming in Perl - Course - (2007-11-18)
  [1224] Object Relation Mapping (ORM) - (2007-06-09)
  [1217] What are factory and singleton classes? - (2007-06-04)
  [1047] Maintainable code - some positive advice - (2007-01-21)
  [836] Build on what you already have with OO - (2006-08-17)
  [831] Comparison of Object Oriented Philosophy - Python, Java, C++, Perl - (2006-08-13)
  [747] The Fag Packet Design Methodology - (2006-06-06)
  [656] Think about your design even if you don't use full UML - (2006-03-24)
  [507] Introduction to Object Oriented Programming - (2005-11-27)
  [236] Tapping in on resources - (2005-03-05)
  [80] OO - real benefits - (2004-10-09)

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