41–50 of 57 posts
This is a great idea. Too bad code can't really be isolated this way. I feel that marking a hack is one of the few legitimate uses for comments in code: //TODO HACK HACK HACKITY HACK
I'll take that as an offhand comment you didn't give much thought to, because wow, there most certainly are lots of legitimate uses for comments in code.
Some of this can/should be done via a CSS system like SASS/Compass. If you're littering overflow:auto into a dozen rules, SASS/Compass would probably help you immensely. When you eventually decide IE6 support isn't needed, flip a single variable and poof--those rules disappear. You could extend this to a _shame.sass file too, of course.
Pedantry: can we call it "guilt.css" instead? In psychological literature, guilt is defined as the "I did something bad" emotion, shame is the "I am bad" emotion. The crucial difference between them is that guilt can be fixed by making amends. That seems like exactly the mindset you want to encourage with this: guilt.css implies that you feel guilty about all the hacks you have and want to make amends, while shame.cs…
Pedantry: can we call it "guilt.css" instead? In psychological literature, guilt is defined as the "I did something bad" emotion, shame is the "I am bad" emotion. The crucial difference between them is that guilt can be fixed by making amends. That seems like exactly the mindset you want to encourage with this: guilt.css implies that you feel guilty about all the hacks you have and want to make amends, while shame.cs…
This is a great idea and to be honest the only time I ever use hacks is when I am adding in compatibility for IE8. I disagree with the !important declaration though. I use LESS for writing CSS and while it's definitely a valuable asset to have, the ability to nest and have super specific queries generated means when you'e writing media queries, you sometimes don't want to have to replicate the nesting and specificiti…
Pedantry: can we call it "guilt.css" instead? In psychological literature, guilt is defined as the "I did something bad" emotion, shame is the "I am bad" emotion. The crucial difference between them is that guilt can be fixed by making amends. That seems like exactly the mindset you want to encourage with this: guilt.css implies that you feel guilty about all the hacks you have and want to make amends, while shame.cs…
I don't know about psychological literature, but in common usage where I'm from, "guilt" is what you feel when you know you've done something you shouldn't, whereas "shame" is what you feel when you believe others either do or will frown on something. In that context, I think "shame" is more appropriate — essentially, it's a collection of code that brings some degree of shame to the project, not code that you should…
Or you could just use a comment. I know I can search my codebase for HACK and see all of my greatest embarrassments.
We have the same thing in Javascript, we call it 'hacks.js'. That's the place you go when things are broken and you're not yet ready to pay down tech debt. Hacks.css sounds nicer than shame.