I’m bring­ing this up from an excep­tion­ally small thing I noticed while at work today. As I have pre­vi­ously stated, I work with Share­Point. Much of the time I am brand­ing it (though not in my cur­rent project!) and so I have a rather inti­mate and abu­sive rela­tion­ship with the pro­gram. I find myself con­stantly find­ing weird styling quirks put into the envi­ron­ment that prove that Share­Point was built by a large group of people.

There are many instances within Share­Point - and I’m sure within WSS as well - where cer­tain styles that should be con­sis­tent end up being done com­pletely dif­fer­ent ways. I wish I had a screen shot as an exam­ple, but you’ll have to use your imag­i­na­tion here. Pic­ture two drop­down but­tons. When you hover over them, they glow, and a menu appears. No pic­ture the HTML for both drop­down but­tons being com­pletely dif­fer­ent, with no shared styles or markup whatsoever.

This hap­pens all over the place. Hell, there is markup all over the place that is either broken, non-​standard (don’t get me started on WSS/SharePoint and it’s default markup) and over 6 thou­sand lines of styles if you add up all the sheets. 6 thou­sand! There is no need for that, and yet it exists because of - say it with me now - the lack of consistency.This lack of con­sis­tency then cas­cades down to people like me, who are stuck styling the damned things. Had there been a dis­cus­sion between the dif­fer­ing groups, or the markup left to a third group so that they could all be struc­tured the same way other peo­ples lives would then be made easier.

Another exam­ple I can bring up is with code. My code, my co-​workers code, random inter­web code, it hap­pens every­where. It is far more fre­quent when you work on rapid prod­ucts, or many projects that build off of their pre­de­ces­sor. I can speak from expe­ri­ence that unless you code with the future in mind you will end up patch­ing things… usu­ally more than once.

In a per­fect world you’d be able to prop­erly scope your work out, develop your use cases, figure out your flow, and develop in a mod­u­lar, expand­able way. This of course requires a couple things: Time, patience, and knowl­edge. I can assure you that even if you think you have all three you don’t. The only time this can ever happen is when you are devel­op­ing some­thing for your­self and even then more often than not you’re just throw­ing some­thing together for your own use, and those tend to be the worst for patch jobs… at least from my experience.

In the end all I can say is plan things out. Figure out a system and stick to it; even if it’s not the best it will at least not be the best every­where. This makes it much easier to upgrade/fix later on. If you come up with 5 dif­fer­ent solu­tions for 5 dif­fer­ent things when they could all share common attrib­utes, you are just making more work for yourself.

Save your time, your brain, and your fellow work­ers from the agony of added work brought about by incon­sis­tency. Get a game plan, stick with it, and for the love of god: be consistent.

P.S. I man­aged to spell con­sis­tency wrong every time in this post while writ­ing it.

P.P.S. Except for the one in the first post­script.

Update:

Suc­cess! I have a screen shot of the drop­down menus in ques­tion!
(Tech­ni­cally this update hap­pened before the post went public, but what­ever)