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Elegant solutions

I just finished reading David Winner’s Brilliant Orange, an examination of football in the Netherlands and how it reflects Dutch mentality in general.

A chapter on problem-solving ends with a quote from Jan Benthem, chief architect of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport:

“In the end the most satisfying solution is the one where you have cleared everything away and there is no solution at all any more but, at the same time, the problem has been solved.”

This is, of course, a goal we work toward but will probably never reach. Whenever I have to implement a “workaround” to address a problem (and this happens too frequently with both CSS and Actionscript), it nags at me to return, refine, and reduce.

What needs to be kept in mind, though, is that the problem still must be solved, and simplicity is not an end in itself. For 40 years, the Dutch have developed and refined an elegant vision of Total Football – and have never won a World Cup.