When Design Hacks Strike
Sep 05, 2006I’ve always been told when designing software, “Don’t resort to hacks and shortcuts. They may save you time now, but will cost you more time later.”
Recently I was rather bluntly reminded of why this is true. In working on some of the interface for Simplist I resorted to doing a quick and dirty table based layout rather than doing it correctly with divs and floats. This of course just came back to bite me as I needed to make some additions to the interface and ended up spending more time playing with table cell alignment and rowspans just to make things look right. After I finish writing this post I will be returning to my code to finish striping out the tables and correctly aligning divs.
So once again, I’ve been reeducated by the labors of code maintenance on why hacks and shortcuts will eventually make your job difficult. Of course I’m sure I’ll do this again one day, just because I’ll be in a hurry to get on to a more pressing code issue rather than fixing the problem correctly the first time. But in the meantime I’m going to get dirty with floats and margins.