Whether or not you've given up using tables for layout you'll no doubt remember the "tag soup" you often ended up with. The trouble with lots of nested tables was knowing which end table tag went with which start tag. The same is true of using DIVs however. If you use enough of them you can end up placing content in the wrong container.

Here's a little trick I've just started using. Whenever I end an element such as a DIV I add an ID to the closing tag. If the start tag has the ID "content" the end tag looks like this:

Now it's easy to spot where each one ends and there's less chance of incorrect nesting. But, there's an issue with this. It's illegal! Try and validate the HTML and you'll get an error for each of these tags. However, the browsers don't complain and everything displays as you'd expect. If validation concerns you (heck, you're a Domino developer, why would you?) you might want to remove all of these end IDs after you've done developing and it's ready for the primetime.

It's a lot like another trick I try to use when coding, whereby you comment all close brackets, like so:

  } // end for (all docs)
 } // end if (!is new doc)
} // end function (doUpdate)

Even with the proper indenting of code like JavaScript and HTML reading through large sections can become a nightmare. Commenting critical end points like this helps no end.