This blog entry is directed mainly at the body of web developers who have very little formal training but are trying to improve their own skill sets. As I've matured in my understanding of object-oriented software design, I've come to grips with certain realities. Often, I've found myself doing something that feels 'dirty' or 'hackish'. That's usually because I'm "doing it wrong" as smarter people say to me when I show them my code or describe my problem. When that happens I have two courses of action, but the only one that provides growth and self-improvement is to heed the advice of my mentors (usually a chorus of developers on IRC saying, "you're doing it wrong!").

In the early days of the web (the early '90s), when the first HTML specification was being adopted, CSS did not exist. Web developers and webmasters (do those even exist anymore?) were responsible for delivering their content, design and layout in one package. It worked great and everything was right with the world. That is, until things became more complex. The roaring '90s of the Internet brought new revisions to the HTML specification and new innovations to web browsers which allowed for increasingly complicated design elements and content delivery methods. The ever-increasing complexity made it more difficult to maintain consistent design across large web sites. That's when big stupid web design suites became popular. Software like Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver became almost a necessity just to maintain page templates and edit pages in a wysiwyg format.