I recently bought and read the electronic version of Adaptive Web Design, written by Aaron Gustafson which was overall a nice -and short- read. Aaron is obviously a good writer, but this is no surprise if one looks at his CV. He also seems like a nice guy -twitter wise-, maybe a bit easier to approach than other folks from the “Zeldman Web Influencers group”. I rarely buy books, but I had a good feeling for this one. Read the whole story
The other day, I was watching the Crockford on JavaScript video series, which was in some dark corner of my bookmarks for quite a while.
In the fourth video of the series, entitled “The Metamorphosis of Ajax”, Douglas Crockford talks a bit about HTML and CSS. He says:
..so HTML was not state of the art when it was introduced in the late 20th century. It was intended for simple document viewers and nothing else. It was not intended to be an application platform… The set of tags is much too small for the things that we’re doing.
.. and started (the SGML people) the mythology of Semantic Markup which is essentially impossible in a system in which you cannot make up your own tags in which you are using a set of tags which was designed for simple technical documents and you’re coding things which have no resemblance to technical documents – there is no opportunity for semantic coding in the system as it currently exists – although there is a lot of belief that this is what we should be doing.
Mr. Crockford is actively involved in the development of the JavaScript language, (and a bunch of other stuff). And I must say, he got me into thinking. Even more when he started talking about CSS and its drawbacks as a language. Most of which I have already realized working as a Front-End: Lack of modularity (you cannot be sure two identical boxes will render in 100% the same way as they might interfere with each other, browser implementation which is often very hard to achieve, constant overloading and redefining of properties etc, etc..)
When I first started building/designing websites back in 2006, I had the impression that the term “Web Designer” could cover everything from PHP to HTML to pure Design work (Fireworks, Illustrator, Photoshop).
Luckily, by following the right people, who with their articles and talks define the web of tomorrow, I got a solid understanding of who’s-doing-what in the industry. Today we’re going to focus on the infamous Front-End Developer.
