So, the more I play around with ideas, the more they keep evolving and changing.
BestPract.us is no exception – the more I work on it, the more I start changing how I’m doing things, writing things, figuring out how to lay it all out. It’s kind of intense. But as I work on more plugins, I’m starting more and more to look at code repositories, like google code. The only problem is – as much of a fan of Google that one can be, I’m hesitant to just drop everything into their server.
I supose it’s all partially the reason why I don’t use their hosting service of javascript libraries. I’m torn. The benefits of using it seem high – CDN through Google, allowing users to potentially have a better experience. This may be okay on personal pages, or on sites where bandwidth is an issue, but, just like the IE CSS debacle that comes up with every version – you then have to worry about every site you used that you may have declared the most recent version of the library instead of the actual version you’re using.
google.load("mootools", "1"); vs. google.load("mootools", "1.2");
Those both call the same version – but when mootools 1.3 comes out, the first example will pull that in – potentially breaking your code.
Oh snap! I forgot about that!
This basically means that developers really need to return to basics. It seems the development on the web is still in its infancy – you can find a thousands of people referring to themselves as web developers online, but like I said before – what does the title “web developer” mean?
If you want to call yourself a web developer, you should follow some generally accepted coding best practices – and, understandably, some “best practices” seem to be pushed out as someone’s opinions without any real evidence it’s “the best” -so that’s why I developed the ever evolving, ever changing BestPract.us – The Best Practices under one roof.
As I dwell on the idea of “costs” this idea is starting to make sense. What Richard did here, he tweaked www.radionz.co.nz by removing sIFR (a bane on developers everywhere) and used Google’s new content delivery network to serve mootools. So after seeing how well it’s worked, it forces me to reconsider, and perhaps bring it up – if our clients could save some dough by Google’s (supposed) generosity, should we all go this route? Should Google host our libraries, potentially making the web a faster place?
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