Context over consistency.

When I first started developing webdesigns and UIs, I was a contractor. That meant I created one template, sliced it down, and delivered. That forced all the sites I designed to follow one basic theme.

It was then when I discovered about server side includes. Do you remember the <!--#include virtual="header.shtml" --> syntax? Huzzah, I could create one template for all my content! But this led to a LOT of uniformity (not a bad thing).

Then I learned about PHP, and I found out even more how I could automate templating - write the template once and it fits in everywhere!

The goal would always be to simplify the templating layer. I would press consistency over context - the same way all the wizards for Windows XP are the same.

Lately, I've been going back to designing and marking down not just the template page, but important view pages as well. This flies in the face of everything I know about maintainability, but I've found that when I do redesigns, I usually trash the whole design and start again anyways, so maintenance be damned. I can't recall a time when I was actually able to do a redesign without touching the markup.

What's interesting is that almost all templating languages I find inside OSS projects (MediaWiki, vBulletin, Wordpress, etc.) are all about promoting consistency over context. Is this implicit laziness towards developing for each view the reason why software is so crappy?

I guess this is no different than the rest of the world - most of us are happy with our mass-produced cars ... but some of us enjoy the craftsmanship of cars built by individual hands.

Of course, what's interesting is that Toyota found a hybrid of mass production and craftsmanship ...