I don’t want to be the neophobe in the room but I sometimes wonder if we’re living in a collective delusion that the current toolchain is great when it’s really just morbidly complex. More JavaScript to fix JavaScript concerns the hell out of me.
Dave Rupert
I've been feeling this hard lately. When we are talking something like WordPress, we care about a few metrics. Page load speed and size being the primary. Memory usage and performance on server matter, but often — sadly – much less.
However, when we are talking the client, the browser, much more should matter.
I am responsible for the code that goes into the machine, I do not want to shirk the responsibility of what comes out. Blind faith in tools to fix our problems is a risky choice. Maybe “risky” is the wrong word, but it certainly seems that we move the cost of our compromises to the client and we, speaking from personal experience, rarely inspect the results.
Yeah, we also rarely analyze the browser memory usage or repaint counts of our pages. I had my laptop fan turn in this morning as I quickly opened a half a dozen tabs from ComicBook.com and they all auto-loaded dozens of trackers and started playing video. Each tab. Safari instantly ran up gigs of memory and my CPU hated me.
But this is modern web development. Who gives a shit anymore?
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I needed the break. Our second child is scheduled to be delivered on December 18th. Of course, that means a ton of prep over the last couple months, including much-needed cleaning, a lot of furniture building, and rearranging everything. And then there is Christmas. Which I kind of love more than any other holiday.
So with an extended weekend because of Thanksgiving, we got a lot done in the Finley Home. Mostly during (well-fought) naps of our daughter Lottie. But I also got some good development time in to work on a couple of projects. I pushed two of the first updates Web Tools has seen in almost a year. For an app that I barely touch, it is still pulling about $200 a month in sales.
I also built a dresser, cycled 30 miles, got our live Christmas tree (see above), and ate a fair amount while attempting not to gain any — regret-inducing — weight. I'm down 25 pounds since the start of Summer and would prefer to keep it that way.
So: great weekend. Relaxation, code, family, and food. I give thanks to God for all of that. My wife is amazing, my daughter is a dream that I enjoy daily, and we have so many blessings in our life that I cannot begin to list.
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Damn. That hit close to home.
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Perfect. I spent most of my summer using my iPad Pro as my primary computer. I love the bewildered look on “professionals” when they see what I can do on it.
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I’m opinionated. If you’ve worked with me or hung out with me for any period of time, you know this. I’ve been building for the web since 2001, before JavaScript libraries, before CSS, before Web Standards. That is a lot of years of experience and with it, one learns a few things. The Standards movement was a major thing just as I was getting started freelancing. jQuery was just coming about as I entered and assisted in teaching a JavaScript class in college. Responsive Web Design was coined and defined as I started my first role at an agency in Chicago.
One learns a few things.
Of the last few years, I have pushed hard against using jQuery. Simply put, most browsers have solid support for new technologies that emulate many of the great features of jQuery. Those native features do it faster, better, and require less code. Remove jQuery and you remove 30+kb of resource load.
I have pushed against Bootstrap. It is a large beast of a library when most sites that include it use it for a grid system and not much else. A grid system can be written in less than 100 lines of CSS that’ll achieve the needs of your site specifically, so why include 200+kb of resources?
I have pushed against WordPress. It’s not good for the developer and offers a not-great experience for the client. There are better CMSs.
So this Summer and Fall, I decided to dabble.
I hadn’t built a website on WordPress in many years. The last one I built was before ACF took off. So I built a client a site in WP and I didn’t hate it. Much of what I have said against WP remains true. Especially after launching a large site on Craft earlier this year. But, for what it does well, it does well. Build a couple of custom plugins was a breeze. ACF made storing complex data from two third-party sources easy and displaying it easier.
I have never used Bootstrap but always maintained that it is best suited for prototyping and administration panels. So as I started building an admin panel for a current project, I decided to try Bootstrap. And I didn’t hate it. There are parts that I won’t touch. The grid system is actually one of them. The spacing utility classes, while useful if you are not writing a lick of CSS, are another. But, the component structure isn’t far from something like Atomic CSS and is actually a welcome thing for the needs of the project. Unfortunately, it requires that the page resources weigh over 300kb, which means I will likely scrap Bootstrap in a few weeks and rewrite with my own CSS.
We must, as developers, not become set in our ways and get dogmatic about certain things. There are things that we should be more opinionated about than others. I wasn’t necessarily wrong with either WordPress or Bootstrap. But, now that I have worked more with each, I can see the lure of them when it comes to getting something done quick and dirty. Atop that, I now have a more solid argument against some points of them.
So if you haven’t dabbled with something in a while or at all, maybe try. You may learn a few things.
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But the core principles and mechanisms [of CSS] are no more complicated than they were a decade or even two decades ago. If anything, they’re easier to grasp now, because we don’t have to clutter our minds with float behaviors or inline layout just to try to lay out a page. Flexbox and Grid (chapters 12 and 13, by the way) make layout so much simpler than ever before, while simultaneously providing far more capability than ever before.
Eric Meyer
I built my first couple of layouts with Grid over the last weeks. Hot dog. Things that would have taken me forever with floats took me just a couple lines of code with Grid. I’ve been using Flexbox for a while, to the point of mostly knowing the syntax, but Grid is a brand new beast.
It is astonishing that we have, for almost 20 years of CSS, never had a native layout system. Now we do. Instead of complex (and large) libraries like Bootstrap, we can now do complex layout with simple syntax. Hell, we can do far more complex, asymmetric and two-dimensional layout with Grid that we would never consider doing before. A renaissance in web design is coming. But are front-end developers up to snuff?
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The subtle difference between progressive enhancement and graceful degradation is lost on too many. Many of those that support “mobile first” don’t support progressive enhancement, which is an oxymoron.
Mobile first is progressive enhancement. Start with the most important part of any site: content. Mark it up. Semantically. Why? Because some readers experience your site without CSS. It’s true. Some just want the content. Screenreaders and search engines are the largest of these.
Then style the content. That’s the CSS. Mobile first says start with the LCD, the Lowest Common Denominator: mobile. But make sure that your CSS works in the LCD. That might be IE 9. It might be IE 11. Look at your analytics if possible. Progressive enhancement means add features when available. Progressively enhancing. You see? So if you are using a feature that is only available to IE 11 and better (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) and you need to support IE 9, make sure that the feature is not necessary for the user experience.
Then JavaScript. Understand that some have JavaScript disabled. Whether it be over-cautious IT departments, search engines that cannot handle rendering and parsing JavaScript, users with bad network connectivity that fails to load it, or most importantly screenreaders that help those with handicaps consume the content of the web. JavaScript is an enhancement. So long as you have the last two components set, your page works fine when JS is turned off. So, as features are available, use them.
But see, too many developers these days have abandoned this methodology that fueled the Web Standards movement. Instead, sites require over 300 kilobytes of JavaScript libraries and don’t load anything if JavaScript is disabled. Instead of starting with content, they start with jQuery, Angular, React, or whatever the library de jour is. Everything is built in JavaScript. This is graceful degradation, start with the Greatest Common Denominator. Except many aren’t even testing for the LCD. They aren’t turning off JS to make sure that their site will work for those that disable JS. Often they even break the most basic components of the web browser: the URL and the back/forward buttons.
We need to get back to progressive enhancement as the standard. We need to get back to the promise that the web is accessible to all, no matter the device they use.
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When every new website on the internet has perfect, semantic, accessible HTML and exceptionally executed, accessible CSS that works on every device and browser, then you can tell me that these languages are not valuable on their own. Until then we need to stop devaluing CSS and HTML.
Mandy Michael
Preach! It’s all I see these days in job descriptions. JAVASCRIPT! Ninja preferred. Rockstar acceptable. And then they produce crap frontend code. Their HTML and CSS is restricted to Bootstrap at best, custom crap with style attributes all over the place at worst. When I was their age, the emphasis of frontend was on the other side of the triangle: HTML and CSS. Without these, your JavaScript means nothing. Even if you are embedding your CSS and HTML in your JavaScript. Shudder.
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Remember faux columns? I just did equal-height columns with flexbox yesterday. The old days sucked.
Now if we could just convince the kids to stop putting HTML and CSS inside the JavaScript…
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I have remained silent for the last week on the matters in Charlottesville. This was a choice, not a lack of concern, a lack of thoughts, or a mistake. I broke that silence last night. I have words. This is for the Christians. Not that this is not relevant for everyone, but this is for the Christians.
Church.
We need to condemn racist language, thoughts, and actions with the strongest words within our walls. Within the Blood, we cannot allow these ideologies. Not white power. Not black power. Not any race above any other. Let me make this clear. This is not welcome in the Church. It is heresy. Elders, this is your job. Come alongside those that speak or think these ideologies and correct them. Church discipline is needed here.
We are all of the bloodline of Adam. Every one of us. We are all of the bloodline of Noah. Every single one. Jesus died to cover the sins of the bloodline of Noah and Adam. That includes everyone. Racism has no place in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. None.
Brothers and Sisters.
The world is not covered in the Blood. Your enemy may not know Jesus. But you do. When you were yet a sinner, Jesus came and died for you. You were worse than a filthy rag. You were the worst of the worst. Jesus had no reasonable reason to love you, yet he did. That is what we are called to, brothers and sisters. Love. Love without rhyme or reason.
In the last week I have seen many of you advocating for violence against both sides. I get it. Antifa has done horrible, violent things. The alt-right has done the same. Vengeance is not yours, though. Let the law punish those that break it. No matter if you advocate for violence against those that commit violence or those that offend with words, you are wrong. You are. You are no better than the fascists and the communists last weekend.
Except you should know better.
Here is my advice. The only thing that can eradicate this present darkness is the Light. So let it come out into the light. This is an extreme minority. It serves no threat. So let them speak. Evil has a way of looking uglier when light is shined on it. But love the people. We are called to love the oppressed. Both of these groups feel oppressed. Whether they are right or wrong, show them love. Walk them to Jesus. You punch them, and you will not be serving Christ, but yourself.
Christian. The world is watching for your response. Don't respond like the world.
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