Bill Scott has a great article on designing a component that is worth a read. He talks about his rules of thumb when building something that should be reusable (and nearly everything should):

• Make the component specific in purpose, yet flexible in use.

Avoid the do-everything component. Instead make it do the main thing well. But make it pragmatic by keeping it flexible.

• Separate the concerns of interface, interaction, and content.

Avoid hard-coding visual style, give flexibility in the interaction model and provide flexible ways to manage data content. Keep these three areas independent to allow them to be customized separately.

• Document the interface and use the component before releasing it.

You know the experience. You think you have a great idea. Then when you go to explain it to another person you immediately see the holes in your logic. Documentation provides a way to explain your interface; writing demos allow you to exercise the component to test its ease of use and flexibility.

There’s a lot more detail and examples in the full article.

This kind of thinking has had a big influence on my work on CNET’s global framework and stumbling across this article just recently made me refocus my thoughts on the topic.

a.n.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 11:27 am and is filed under Best Practices, CNET JS Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.