Following on from her great conversation with Jen on The Web Ahead podcast, Rachel outlines a strategy to avoid feeling overwhelmed by the deluge of tools, frameworks, libraries, and techniques inundating front-end developers every day:
Learn your core skills well. Understand HTML and CSS, be able to build a layout without leaning on a framework. Get a solid understanding of how a website actually gets from the server to a browser, an understanding of security and accessibility. These are the basics, the constants. These things change slowly. These things sit underneath all the complexity and the tooling, the CMSs and the noise of thousands of people all trying to make their mark on this industry.
She also makes this important point:
As you are doing this don’t forget to share what you know.
This is a spot-on analysis of how CSS-in-JS failed to deliver on any of its promises:
CSS-in-JS was born out of good intentions — modularity, predictability and componentization. But what we got was complexity disguised as progress.
This is a superb way to deprecate a little JavaScript library. Now that you can just use HTML instead, the website for Pikaday has been turned into a guide to choosing the right design pattern for your needs. Bravo!
Pikaday is no longer a JavaScript date picker. Pikaday is now a friendly guide for front-end developers. I want to push developers away from the classic date picker entirely. Especially fat JavaScript libraries.
- Building HTML pages is easy
- Pure HTML is evergreen
- Bloated web pages are too slow
- I can host it anywhere, often for free
- Accessibility and SEO benefits are automatic
- It won’t need security patches
- There are no build steps
- Install Stuff Indiscriminately From npm
- Pick a Framework Before You Know You Need One
- Always, Always Require a Compilation Step
This is a really thoughtful look at the evolution of CSS and the ever-present need to balance power with learnability.
Some handy tips courtesy of Chris Ferdinandi.
HTML’s new `command` attribute on the `button` element could be a game-changer.
Having fun with view transitions and scroll-driven animations.
It’s almost as though humans prefer to use post-hoc justifications rather than being rational actors.
A genuinely inspiring event.