friday 5:30 pm kinds of problems and shaking old habits

One problem with being in the industry a decade and a half or so is that old habits die hard.

FOR EXAMPLE, I suspect some possible future employers will be thinking I'm a cave-dwelling Netscape 4.7 barbarian unless I go refactor out the use <table> for layout purposes on those sites I wrote in 2005 or so.

(THAT SAID, CSS only recently is anywhere near caught up with tables in its ability to position multiple objects relative to each other- the fact that this page on fluid width equal height columns even suggests monstrosities such as
margin-bottom: -99999px; 

padding-bottom: 99999px;

points to some serious limitations! (That hopefully flexbox et al will be resolving...) But really, I think <table> is a shibboleth, since if you're using <div> for display, you're pretty far from the html5 dream of the Semantic web anyway..)

ANYWAY. Old habits. One was in my use of console.log(). Earlier versions of it weren't very smart, it would just cast everything to a string.  And so I developed habits of doing stuff like this:

console.log("the thing is "+JSON.stringify(thing));

but that of course meant I would miss out on chrome's ability to display the object in the console in clever, expandable way.

But console.log happily also takes multiple arguments now too! So you can do

console.log("the thing is ", thing);

which is the best of all worlds; getting rid of JSON.stringify() cruft, having an expandable view of thing, and still having a human readable caption.

FINALLY, before I realized/remembered about how flexible chrome's console.log() is, I learned the hard way that JSON.stringify() on a variable set to a function gets very weirdish results. Just don't do it. I thought I was going nuts with my ability to curry a function until I realized it was because I was throwing JSON.stringify() into the mix.