Many websites these days are very graphic intensive, have a ton of contrast between content the the background, or are simply overly complicated. One method to reduce this visual noise and provide a more harmonic user experience would be to downplay elements on the screen that the user is likely not paying attention to.
After listening to Dan Wilson’s session on Making Bad Code Good at cf.Objective() 2010, it really got me to thinking of some best practices that I wish everyone would follow in order to keep that maintenance period (which consumes a majority of a developer’s time and effort) as short as possible.
A major headache that many developers experience when coding their Mach-II views is the fact that they end up writing and re-writing the same (or similar) complex code in order to output simple elements like anchor tags or alternating row colors in a list or table.
Luckily, since version 1.8, Mach-II offers the view tag library to not only help reduce the amount of code required in each view, but make the code easier to read and look cleaner.
What are Search Engine Safe (SES) URLs anyway? Typical dynamic pages generated by server-side code require that either FORM or URL-scoped variables be provided in order to differentiate one dynamic page from another. A majority of these URLs look plain ugly: index.cfm?event=welcome&firstName=Adrian&lastName=Scott.
Wouldn’t it be a lot nicer if we got rid of the ?, =, and & symbols in favor of a more structured (and clean) method like: index.cfm/event/welcome/firstName/Adrian/lastName/Scott/. Not only are URLs like this easier to read and understand, but they supposedly also increase search engine optimization.