It's all done with html, css and javascript. Web UI development is all bag of tricks; the big frameworks try to unify these disparate tools and techniques under one API .. but it's not always clean. Worse than UI is data management. Data model, layout, access, searchability, performance, distribution of the underlying system and its scalability, etc. Worse than both is session management. There is no one HOWTO for th…
As someone more used to playing in the enterprise backend software space, I figured that combining html, css, and javascript was the hell required to really get into web dev. Plus adding in the "you're either have taste or not" issue for UI design makes professional web dev sound like so much fun.
You mention using a "decent javascript library." Is this the first step these days? I've gone back and forth whether to go from "first principles" vs just grabbing jQuery and having at it.