Ask HN: What are some knowledge gaps you commonly see for web developers?

interviewing vs. on the job

Personal pet peeve: only the latest versions of browser are supported - in the moment some new css/html/js feature is available, it is integrated in the website at lightspeed.

On it's own, this wouldn't be a problem of course. My problem with this is that there is no website on the web today that was technically impossible 5 years ago. Still, a 5 years old browser is unusable today due to this. (thinking primariy about ipads, which come with not updateable browsers)

Not sure if this is knowledge gap, or just simply unwillingness to write code that works on the widest range of devices...

I think this depends on who your customers are. If your customer is a regulated utility that may be required to use equipment that has been "licensed" for certain purposes, making sure websites work with older versions of browsers is very important. On the other hand, if you're targeting high-ish net worth end users who may be expected to always run the most recent browser version on the most recent hardware, then it would make sense to always target the most recent features.

From what I've seen:

- An inability to work without frameworks. Lots of devs know React/Angular/Vue/whatever, but have a tenuous grasp of vanilla JavaScript

- Lack of computer science/algorithm knowledge. True of myself, and a lot of self taught developers.

- Lack of CSS knowledge. Quite a few devs know a decent amount of HTML, a decent amount of JavaScript (including one or two frameworks) but haven't brushed up on their CSS knowledge in a while. So they'll not know modern additions to the language, or in the worst cases, not know stuff like Grid or Flexbox.

- Accessibility in general is often a knowledge gap, especially given how many devs have an unfortunate mindset of 'every HTML element is a div'. Or thinking that buttons and links are interchangable.

- Browser compatibility is often downplayed a bit too. Quite a few devs know little about browser support for features, with some forgetting that browsers other than Chrome exist.

- And obviously, any sort of deeper knowledge of the tech stack or other aspects of system development. HTTP, server configuration, dev ops, etc are often a black box here.

I suppose if you didn’t grow up with privacy it’s hard to understand its importance, which is a real tragedy.