Theodicius
Good. Evil. Bratwurst.

I’ve been rethinking my approach to web design starting from First Principles going forward, and I think it’s coherent enough to be exposed to the public.

Before I begin, I think I ought to tell you what it’s not.

• It’s not a checklist. I don’t believe in checklists for anyone beyond the apprentice stage in any craft. Between our ears is one of the better information processing and decision making engines on the planet; I firmly believe in using it to the fullest extent. If you need a literary allusion for this, try Nero Wolfe’s advice to Archie (on numerous occasions): “Use your intelligence, as guided by experience.”
• It’s not the be-all and end-all set of engineering principles for the craft. We don’t collectively know enough about the craft to presume to use the term “engineering” for it.
• While I consider the principles to be logically derived and valid, concrete expressions of these principles can vary, so I am neither prescribing a design/development methodology nor proscribing one.

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I’ve been getting more Joomla work thrown at me these days (one of the nice things, from a professional’s POV, about the Joomla community is there are so many amateurs building Joomla sites there’s never a shortage of installations that need fixed) so I decided I needed to get more familiar with MooTools, the javascript library the dev team chose for Joomla.

This makes the third javascript framework I’ve been working with (prototype/scriptaculous for Rails, and jQuery for my non-Joomla PHP and .NET projects) so while I certainly don’t hold myself up as an expert in frameworks, I’m not fresh from the farm, either. I’d already written the usual “cute effects” in MooTools (such as rearranging layout boxes, hiding boxes and sliding them out, etc.) so for the first “serious” project in MooTools I chose to implement the FontUnstack jQuery plugin. (from an idea by Andy Clarke as implemented by Phil Oye at GitHub.

The journey was interesting, to say the least.
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