What are horizontal and vertical design elements?

Question

I was going through this article on Architectural Anti-Patterns and it talks about horizontal and vertical design elements getting intermixed to form an unstable architecture.

I was not able to google the definition of these terms.

Answer 1

Horizontal and Vertical elements as the author of the article defines them are

"Vertical design elements are dependent upon the individual application and specific software implementations. Horizontal design elements are those that are common across applications and specific implementations"

Usually the use of these terms is in the context of a single solution and then the roles are a little different where horizontal elements are those relating to a specific layer e.g. components for data access, UI element and vertical relate to cross cutting concerns like authentication, auditing etc.

Answer 2

To be more precise Horizontal talks about Technical/Framework related and vertical talks more about business functionality.