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by Elliotte Rusty Harold.
Original Post: Why Refactor HTML?
Feed Title: The Cafes
Feed URL: http://cafe.elharo.com/feed/atom/?
Feed Description: Longer than a blog; shorter than a book
Here’s part 2 of the ongoing serialization of Refactoring HTML, also available from Amazon and Safari.
How do you know when it’s time to refactor? What are the smells of bad code that should set your nose to twitching? There are quite a few symptoms, but these are some of the smelliest.
Smell: Illegible Code
The most obvious symptom is that you do a View Source on the page and it might as well be written in Greek (unless, of course, you’re working in Greece). Most coders know ugly code when we see it. Ugly code looks ugly. Which would you rather see, Listing 1.1 or Listing 1.2? I don’t think I have to tell you which is uglier, and which is going to be easier to maintain and update.
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