Your Spelling Mistakes Keep Me Up At Night

The work I do depends on spelling words correctly. The work I do depends on naming things consistently.

I can name an element “fragglerock” not very semantic but we have to remain entertained. We have to keep our spirits up.

If I write code that needs to be able to find “fragglerock” but I’ve gone and created object “fraggelrock” – the code looking for fragglerock will die.

If I write out an element name in the HTML outline and then try to style it in the stylesheet but I misspelled the name in one of the locations nothing will happen. Nothing happening is a harmless result. Nothing happening is a lot better than things breaking or not working. I’ll take nothing happening over breaking any day. Plus since I’m the one in control of both the HTML outline and the stylesheet I can find my spelling mistake and correct it. And then things will happen. Good things.

If I spell something one way and base code around that particular spelling and then you spell it another way, the code won’t get to do its job. Poor little code.

Any coder knows this stuff, by the way. I think we might come off as crotchety, old schoolmarms to “normal” people because we harp on endlessly about consistency. It’s because we need and require and apply consistent spelling or naming of things in order to do our work and to have our work, work.

If we hand off a site to someone and ( God forbid) some of its features require consistent spelling when the site is updated, we will probably get an email in a few weeks (or days) saying the site is not working.

Consistency when naming things and correct spelling when typing those names of the things, will result in those things always being named and spelled the same way. That is not only a statement of the obvious it’s also a redundant statement.

If I require a normal person to be consistent about naming things to the point of acquiring an OCD I can expect the work to fail. Recent case: the chosen eCommerce solution didn’t provide large enough product images. I decided to use the name of the product to create a url that linked to a gallery of larger images which I devised via the implementation of another thing you might have heard of: WordPress. In their local application they can type the product name any way they want but they have to type it the same way in the WordPress side. This worries me in particular… The code “reads” the product name in the template for the eCommerce solution and the code I wrote creates URLs out of these names but the viability of the URLs depends on the galleries being named (and spelled) the same as the product name. If this system fails new image galleries won’t load in the eCommerce template.

Fragglerock or Fraggelrock, but never both.