I recently came across an old draft post from 2007 that I never published. It looks finished enough to simply push it out as-is. While it was obviously written before the explosion of CSS frameworks and tools like Blueprint and Compass, those don’t really have much impact on the core of what I was saying. I hope you find it useful…

–Tim

This morning I read a post by Jon Udell that ignited a series of latent thoughts I’ve had, mostly centered around CSS, aspects, and screencasting.

In his post, Matthew Levine’s holy grail, Jon praises the theory of CSS but bemoans the drudgery that so many of us not-a-designer-but-geek-enough-to-try types face at some point or other:

To be honest, although I’m hugely fond of CSS styling, I’ve always struggled with CSS layouts, and I know I’m not the only one in that boat. When you read the explanation in Matthew’s article, you can see why. CSS layout is like one of those games where you slide 15 tiles around in a 16-square matrix. In principle it is a declarative language, but in practice the techniques are highly procedural: Step 1, Step 2, etc.

Jon goes on to request a pattern library for CSS layouts, and while I think it’s a great idea I don’t think it’s enough. In my many years of web programming experience few things been more intriguing and challenging as deconstructing a complex web design from someone else and distilling it to the essentials. In the end, we muddle through, leaving unnecessary HTML and CSS constructs littered throughout our new site. Data needs evolve for the site, invoking the corresponding evolutionary change in the HTML and CSS constructs. The ebb and flow of change ultimately builds up enough sediment in our design that, like your old water heater, you simply throw it out and start afresh.

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Queries are a way of asking a computer system questions. (I heard you say ‘duh!’) You’ve probably done this lots in SQL to ask your database questions. How many members have this condition? How much money was sent to these people in August? But how about this one: Which file has the bean named ‘myCrazyService’ in it? Or, How many projects refer to the old version of ‘projectFastMoving’? For these questions you should turn to the *nix-like file utilities.

Standard *nix tools can be used to create queries that your filesystem can answer. Let’s start with find.

The find utility

The find command lets you locate files that are named in a specific way, and that have certain file attributes. Let’s look at an example:

find . -iname SpriNg.xml

This query searches the current directory, and looks for files with names like: spring.xml, Spring.xml, or sprinG.xml. The i in iname means that the pattern will use a case-insensitive comparison when matching against existing files. Let’s try another:

find . -name proj*.xml -maxdepth 2

This code searches the current directory, and will go down only 2 folders below this one in search of matches. It will look for files named like: projector.xml, project.xml, and proj2.xml. Limiting the depth can greatly speed your search. So can starting at a lower level of the directory structure.

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