@robdmoore

This post outlines some of my views about testing web applications, and why automated testing of web applications is important. This post somewhat assumes an MVC pattern, but the same concepts apply if you aren’t using MVC.

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I really dislike American spelling of words. Nothing personal, but I guess growing up with knowledge about how words are spelt and then seeing words spelt “wrong” is frustrating (particularly when you can’t turn off a US spell-checker and it keeps “auto-correcting” your words to incorrect spelling).

Something my team has a discussion on this week was what our naming convention should be for words that have different spelling in US English vs Australian English (the most common one that has come up lately is finalise vs finalize).

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I hate using spaces for indentation. I’m just putting it out there. My work mates think it’s a bit silly to have such a strong opinion on such a minor (mostly invisible) thing, however the pedantic perfectionist in me feels strongly about this.

Why do I hate using spaces for indentation? I’ll let the comparative advantages (and disadvantages) speak for themselves.

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When using a templating language to output HTML it’s often quite useful and natural to have the concept of a “tag” syntax e.g. (using some random custom ColdFusion tags as an example):

• Self-closing: <cf_form_field label="Some Label" value="The value" />
• Nested: <cf_form_section heading="Some heading"> ... </cf_form_section>

The tags would implicitly output to the page and can be side-by-side with HTML code without needing start and end code delimiters (such as <% … %> or , etc.).

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I’ve been doing web development professionally since 2004 and in that time I’ve learnt a lot and I consider myself to be a good web developer. I’m mostly self-taught, learning most of what I know from research on the Internet, in combination with experimentation, to both find out the way things work and figure out the best ways to use them.

While the Internet is an amazing resource, there is a lot of bad information out there and you should always be careful when taking information at face value. I’ve compiled a list of links to information that I personally think is important if you want to be a good web developer (or designer).

It’s really difficult trying to bring to mind all of the most important things that I know so there is probably quite a bit missing, but this is a good start. I may well follow this post with another one later with things I’ve missed. If you think there is something really important that I’ve missed fell free to leave a comment.

Without further ado (written in C# for fun, if you don’t know C# it’s ok just click on the links):

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