Dave Ferrick

A response to John Metzler’s SERP article & a Title tag idea http://ping.fm/tydBb

a roundup of html/css time savers

hayleybackwards:

I hate redundancy. I hate things that I have to do that are redundant. Yes, a bad attempt at humour!

The link short list without the commentary:

• zen coding
• haml
• sass
• less
• compass

zen coding was the first thing I read about last night. I still haven’t gotten the demo video to load, but it appears to be like HTML macros on crack or something along those lines. Which might’ve been real revolutionary if I hadn’t discovered some other tools last night. And the problem? It still expands out to overly verbose HTML code. And plus, it requires basically learning a language unto itself to remember how to properly expand everything.

And if you’re going to learn something new, you might as well go for something “prettier”. Which leads me to:

haml (for html) and sass (for css) have got to be my favourites right now (though I haven’t had time to try any of the stuff I found last night). Yes, they’re basically like having to learn a new language. But since I’m already use to Python’s so-called semantic whitespace, haml/sass makes perfect sense to me with how they breakdown html/css documents (you use a “compiler” to put them into normal html/css syntax). And unlike anything that’s essentially a macro, your documents stay in the clean form, making them more readable down the line. Granted, the proof of the pudding is in the eating as they say.

less (for CSS) is kinda the middle ground between CSS and SASS. Less requires all them ucky curly braces and basically looks like CSS, but given that I never got all that familiar with CSS to begin with, I might be better off with SASS.

Plus, SASS has compass and had I bothered to watch the nearly hour-long screencast on compass, I might actually know how much of a plus that is.

I like wasting lots of time, in order to discover how to save time!

RT: @DougH What do you think? New hashtag today: #betterthanbelichick. Use it to brag about a good decision you made in the last 24 hours.