In our case – no. Every page except /login must be secure. If you are working on a system where only certain pages must be secure, then yes, that would work.

Ah, yeah, that’s a good example.

So, Derick, using his example, would deviation here be a case where you make an exception not to inherit from the abstract base class?

All my navigation classes should have a Go method.
So I create a abstract base class that has an abstract Go method.
Now the standard of having a Go method for all navigation classes is nicely and easily enforced, because if someone inherits from navigation they have to implement Go.

Standard becomes default.

It’s a very powerful concept. I try to use it all the time when designing a framework. So much better to capture convention explicitly by making it default, rather than relying on teaching and memory.

When you put it in those terms, I start to think about how I (personally) think about standards depending on context.

When working on a team of, say, 4 developers, the notion of standards means a lot different than when I’m working on a team that has, say, 50 developers.

Having dealt with both recently, you really do get a different sense of the cost of deviating from a set standard.

@thetamind: “now how far do u go? Enforce passing test/code style on commit? Get flak for protecting user experience aka Apple app store?”

me: “if xcode and the ios sdk made usability so easy that you had to jump through hoops to make a bad app, that would be a good thing”

me: “enforcing test / code style on commit is actually the opposite of what i want” … “i want test / code style to be baked into the way we work, so that we don’t have to check it”

maybe the additional examples how clarify the point?

the way we work should conform to the standards we have, without extra effort. it should only take effort to deviate from the standards.

… hmm… how to word it differently…

i shouldn’t have to choose to follow the standards. i shouldn’t have to remember to follow the standards. i shouldn’t have to explicitly make a decision to implement or use the standards. i should only have to choose to deviate from them. the standards should be the default way that the system works. but the system should still allow me the freedom to deviate from the standards, when necessary.

not sure if that helps, or if i’m just saying the same thing again.

i think @thetamind summed it up pretty well via a comment on twitter: “Reminds me of convention over configuration in #rails. Smart by default. It’s simpler to only specify exceptions to the rule”

That aside, in all seriousness, what is the point you are trying to make? It seems like you have a good point to make, but I can’t figure out what it is.

Admittedly I’m slow, but there seems to be a disconnect between the “Helping Users make good decisions” section and the “Helping Developers make good decisions” section.

I’ve written more worse blog posts than you’ve had Sundays (I have no idea from whom, but I think I’ve stolen that from someone, I just think it sounds funny), but maybe you might think about reformulating your main point into another post. It just doesn’t seem to tie together.

YMMV

yeah – i struggled to title this one for a while… I was going to title it “Don’t make me choose to follow the standards. Make me choose to deviate from them” – but that was far too wordy.

I couldn’t think of a better way to express what I was trying to say, so I just chopped it short hoping it would become obvious once the content was read.

guess it didn’t quite pan out the way i hoped.

Why shouldn’t you allow the choice to follow standards or not?