‘Iacta alea est’
Categorising the variables in yesterday’s post was helpful in noticing very concretely some of the themes in Michel Marten’s notes.
If we try and put the variable elements into some kind of hierarchy then we start see the decorating structures more clearly.
Limiting ourselves to the elements of a field in the first instance, we can start from a central core, the data structure.
email_subscription = {
email: "address@example.com"
}
This gives us the attribute name email and the value address@example.com. Let’s also take the variable name as the object name email_subscription.
This is our core. From this we can derive everything in the “object” name + attribute name category, as well as the object attribute category.
We can decorate this with the form-control type which is input[type=email].
We can then also further decorate this with validations and the associated error messages.
The last element of decoration is the UI Text including the label and the help text.
That covers the outward decoration from the form/model object and gives us everything we need for that particular field.
The form’s action and method are routing concerns, and the button text a UI concern. These are distinct from the field itself. In a framework like Rails, building on convention, the action and method are derived from the model object. Elsewhere these can be defined explicitly.
It would also be interesting to compare where in a framework or library each of these individual elements has their source. Are these sources consistent across libraries or are they mixed up?
—Wednesday 23rd June 2021.