Blog Archive for / 2007 / 12 /

Elegance in Software Part 2

Tuesday, 11 December 2007

In my earlier blog post on Elegance in Software I gave a list of things that I feel contribute to elegant code, and asked for input from my readers. This post is the promised follow-up.

Several respondents mentioned the book Beautiful Code, which is a collection of essays by "leading computer scientists" describing code they feel is beautiful, and why. I've only read an excerpt myself, but it's got good reviews, and what I've read has enticed me to read more. There's also a blog related to the book, which is well worth a read.

Another common theme was the "I know it when I see it" factor. Though I alluded to this in the introduction of my previous post by saying that "elegance is in the eye of the beholder", a lot of people felt this was far more important than any "tick list": there's something special about truly elegant code that transcends the details, just like really good art is more than just a collection of well-executed brush strokes that make up a well-chosen composition. I agree here: elegant code just says "ooh, that's good" when you read it, it has a "Quality without a Name".

Thomas Guest pointed out that appearance plays a part (whilst also discussing the importance of efficiency), and I agree. This ties in with good naming and short functions: if the code is poorly laid out, it's hard to argue that it's elegant. Yes, you can get a "source code beautifier" to physically rearrange the code, but good appearance often goes beyond that: if(some_boolean == true) is just not elegant, no matter how well-spaced it is. This also impacts the language used: it's harder to write "pretty" code in Perl than in Ruby or Scheme.

I particular liked Chris Dollin's characterization: it is obvious what elegant code does when you read it, but it's not necessarily an obvious approach when you haven't seen it before. This ties in with another theme amongst respondents: simplicity. Though I mentioned "minimal code" and "easy to understand" in my original list, "simplicity" goes beyond that, and I think that Chris's obvious solution to a complex problem highlights this. If the code is sufficiently easy to understand that a solution to a complex problem appears obvious, then it's probably a good demonstration of simplicity. Such code is "clever with a purpose" (as Pat Maddox described it).

Jim Shore has an interesting article on good design, in which he argues that the eye-of-the-beholder-ness of "elegant" is too vague for his liking, and instead tries to argue for "Quality with a Name". He says:

"A good software design minimizes the time required to create, modify, and maintain the software while achieving acceptable run-time performance."

Whilst this is definitely true, this ties in with the "tick list" from my previous posting. Elegant code is more than that, and I think this is important: software development is a craft, and developers are craftsmen. By taking pride in our work, by striving to write code that is not just good, but elegant, we are improving the state of our craft. Just as mathematicians strive for beautiful or elegant proofs, and are not satisfied with a proof by exhaustion, we should not be satisfied with code that is merely good, but strive for code that is elegant.

It is true that what I find to be elegant may be different from what you find to be elegant, but I hope believe that good programmers would agree that two pieces of code were "good code" even if they differ in their opinion of which is more elegant, much as art critics would agree that both a painting by Monet and one by Van Gogh were both good paintings, whilst differing in their opinion of which is better.

Posted by Anthony Williams
[/ design /] permanent link
Tags: design, elegance, software
Stumble It! | Submit to Reddit | Submit to DZone

Comment on this post

If you liked this post, why not subscribe to the RSS feed or Follow me on Twitter? You can also subscribe to this blog by email using the form on the left.

Testing Your Website in Multiple Browsers

Monday, 03 December 2007

When designing websites, it is very important to check the results in multiple web browsers — something that looks fine in Internet Explorer may look disastrous in Firefox, and vice-versa. This problem is due to the different way in which each web browser interprets the HTML, XHTML and CSS standards, combined with any bugs that may be present. If you're designing a website, you have no control over which browser people will use to view it, so you need to ensure that your website displays acceptably in as many different browsers as possible.

The only way to know for sure how a website looks in a particular browser is to try it out. If you don't check it, how do you know you won't hit a bug or other display quirk? However, given the plethora of web browsers and operating systems out there, testing in all of them is just not practical, so you need to choose a subset. The question is: which subset?

Popular browsers

Thankfully, most people use one of a few "popular" browsers, but that's still quite a few. In my experience, on Windows, the most popular browsers are Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera, on Linux most people use Firefox, Mozilla or Netscape and on MacOS most people use Safari or Camino. Obviously, the relative proportions of users using each browser will vary depending on your website, and target niche — a website focused on non-technical users is far more likely to find users with Internet Explorer on Windows than anything else, whereas a website focused on linux kernel development will probably find the popular browser is Firefox on linux.

Which version?

It's all very well having identified a few popular browsers to use for testing, but an equally crucial aspect is which version of the browser to test. Users of Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, and recent versions of Netscape might be expected to upgrade frequently, whereas users of Internet Explorer might be far less likely to upgrade, especially if they are non technical (in which case they'll stick with the version that came with their PC). Checking the logs of some the websites I maintain shows that the vast majority of Firefox users (90+%) are using some variant of Firefox 2.0 (though there are a smattering all the way back to Firefox 0.5), whereas Internet Explorer users are divided between IE7 and IE6, with the ratio varying with the site.

Don't forget a text-only browser

A text only browser such as Lynx is ideal for seeing how your site will look to a search engine spider. Not only that, but certain screen reader applications will also give the same view to their users. Consequently, it's always worth checking with a text-only browser to ensure that your site is still usable without all the pretty visuals.

Multiple Browsers on the same machine

Having chosen your browsers and versions, the simplest way to test your sites is to install all the browsers on the same machine. That way, you can just open the windows side by side, and compare the results. Of course, you can't do this if the browsers run on different platforms, but one option there is to use virtual machines to test on multiple platforms with a single physical machine. Testing multiple versions of Internet Explorer can also be difficult, but TredoSoft have a nice little package called Multiple IEs which enables you to install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on the same PC. Thanks to Multiple IEs, on my Windows XP machine I've got IE3, IE4.01, IE5.01, IE5.5, IE6 and IE7, as well as Firefox, Opera, Safari and Lynx!

Snapshot services

If you don't fancy installing lots of browsers yourself, or you don't have access to the desired target platform, you can always use one of the online snapshot services such as browsershots (free) or browsercam (paid). These provide you with the ability to take a snapshot of your website, as seen in a long list of browsers on a long list of platforms. Browsercam also provides remote access to the testing machines, so you can interact with your sites and check dynamic aspects, such as Javascript — something that's becoming increasingly more important as AJAX becomes more prevalent.

Posted by Anthony Williams
[/ testing /] permanent link
Tags: testing, browsers, website, webdesign
Stumble It! | Submit to Reddit | Submit to DZone

Comment on this post

If you liked this post, why not subscribe to the RSS feed or Follow me on Twitter? You can also subscribe to this blog by email using the form on the left.

Previous Entries Later Entries

Design and Content Copyright © 2005-2025 Just Software Solutions Ltd. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy