heisel.org

PHP’s object syntax

Friday | July 16, 2004 | 3:55 pm  

PHP 5 is out, and with it comes better support for objects.

Having been smitten with another P language, I haven’t played with PHP much recently, but one thing struck me as odd.

What’s up with the object references in that language?

PHP uses -> as a seperator, instead of a period — does that strike anyone as odd?

Other languages use dot-notation — which is a fancy term for a period.

So while some of us would do this: foo.bar()

PHP users have to do this: foo->bar()

While the arrow is nice, a good visual way to indicate that you’re accessing an object’s method or properties, is it really worth two keystrokes (three if you count the shift to get the >)?

It may seem minor to some, but it feels fairly disruptive to me.

My hands are used to belting out a period, and often — us journalists like short sentences, and we like our periods (semicolons need not apply).

P.S. Apologizes for not mention our new Adsense ads — its a trial at the moment. If you find them too much, do drop a comment… we’re about as attached to them as we are to -> notation.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Technology

(Epi)Centrist designers

Thursday | July 1, 2004 | 1:27 pm  

Leave it to the folks at 37signals to come with up a great name and method for Web design — epicenter-based design.

This is something that I, and probably a lot of designers, have been doing, both consciously and subconsciously for a while. This is a great example of the “Architectural Digest discussion” that we should be having.

Blogs are very popular — for a variety of reasons — but one thing that interests me is how popular the design of blogs have become… even for non-blog sites.

The default templates of most blog publishing systems, and most of the custom templates out there, epitomize this epicentrist design idea.

What makes a blog a blog is its content — so put it front and center and let the rest of the page elements flow around this center.

While I agree with almost all of the points made over at MediaSavvy about why Newspapers should be more like a blog, I’d like to add “Design your site to be more like a blog.”

I think this content-focused, reverse-chronological way of presenting frequently updated content — that has originated with blogs — is quickly becoming the defacto UI for presenting news online.

This will become even more so, I suspect, as RSS readers and newspaper feeds end up in the hands of more consumers.

Those apps, for the most part, default to a very “blog-like” view of the incoming entries — whether they be news stories, software updates, or even good deals on Apple goods.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Web design