The Wonderful World of Bugs

The Wonderful World

of Bugs

1by Andy Budd of Clearleft.com

Hacks


How many people feel they use too many hacks?

and how many people feel that use too few?


Hacks have been

given a bad name…

…literally


Wouldn’t be here

today if it wasn’t for

CSS hacks


Sadly, hacks have

become synonymous

with CSS


It doesn’t have to be

this way…


Bug Fixing


Browsers are buggy…


…but not as buggy as we’d like to think

Bugs come from

lots of places•Syntactic errors

•Specificity clashes

•Overly complicated code

•Browser bugs

•Incomplete understanding of the

CSS specification


Andy’s first law of bug fixing…

…keep it simple (stupid)


Andy’s second law of bug fixing…

…always assume it’s your fault


Andy’s third law of bug fixing…

…prevention is better than cure


Andy’s fourth law of bug fixing…

…offence is the best form of defence


Andy’s fifth law of bug fixing…

…isolate the problem


Andy’s sixth law of bug fixing…

…use hacks only as a last resort


Using Hacks Sensibly


Types of Hack•Hacks that rely on parsing bugs

•Hacks that rely on unsupported or

misinterpreted CSS


Good hacks…


• Are valid

• Only target older browsers

• Are ugly?

Responsible hacking

• Use hacks sparingly

• Only add a small number of hacks to

your main CSS

• Better to filter hacks into separate

stylesheets

• Always comment your hacks


Questions?


Thanks you!

http://www.andybudd.com/atmedia06


The Wonderful World of Bugs

Technology

Transcript of The Wonderful World of Bugs