With so many frameworks that do almost everything out of the box, and stackoverflow, why would you even care?
What's the value of a developer then, if his/hers only job is to cobble together frameworks and snippets?
80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills
61–70 of 130 posts
Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I understand missing accessibility (either you have ARIA or you don't), but what does "solid markup skills" mean? The differences between many tags is just user agent stylesheet defaults. If I wanted to be extra crazy, I could build a website using alone. Or maybe I am just a bad developer.
> I could build a website using alone. Then my scraper that reads headlines on your website with `//(h1|h2|h3)` will not work. And I will not be able to read and linearize your tabular data. And plenty of other things. (Things you probably do not care about.) Oh, and you website will have no links (the `href` attribute of ` ` is not simulable via CSS).
> Oh, and you website will have no links (the `href` attribute of `` is not simulable via CSS).
JavaScript to the rescue!
Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills
#63d-d-d-d-d-douuuuuchebag
Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills
#64Just use some automated coding test like Codility: https://codility.com/ Even an easy JavaScript programming tasks can filter a lot of applications so you can concentrate on best candidates.
I could not figure out what exactly they are doing and how much it costs. Would you mind clarifying that.
You can send link to candidates asking them to do some coding tests. From as simple as reverse a string, FizzBuzz to more difficult ones.
That way you can pick the best ones by technical merit, not be their ability to write nice resume.
I don't remember the exact price, but when my company used them it was something in range of $100-500 / month.
Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be worried they were asking about clearfix as opposed to flexbox.
I'd be worried about both! If you have to clear a float, you can do it even more cleanly in CSS by using a psuedo element. The old trick was to set `overflow: hidden` on the element containing floated items so it would always expand to contain it - but then things like box-shadows get cut off by the containing element. To get around this, you can use an `:after` pseudo-element on the element that contains the float i…
This right here is why I hate CSS.
Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I understand missing accessibility (either you have ARIA or you don't), but what does "solid markup skills" mean? The differences between many tags is just user agent stylesheet defaults. If I wanted to be extra crazy, I could build a website using alone. Or maybe I am just a bad developer.
> I could build a website using alone. Then my scraper that reads headlines on your website with `//(h1|h2|h3)` will not work. And I will not be able to read and linearize your tabular data. And plenty of other things. (Things you probably do not care about.) Oh, and you website will have no links (the `href` attribute of ` ` is not simulable via CSS).
You can do some hacky stuff with onClick listeners for links, especially if its a single page. That said, I do not do this. But I don't think I use much beyond div, span, a, ul, li, table (and friends), form (and crew), h1-6, script, body, head, and html. I know there are more HTML tags, but I rarely use them. They are all pretty self explanatory, and I have hard time believing the author looked at 80 pages and everyone used the wrong tags.
Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I respectfully disagree. I'd much prefer to understand the real technologies that run the web -- HTML, CSS, HTTP, and so on -- and then use tools and build abstractions on top when it's useful. Starting with some specific framework or tool set inevitably limits what you can achieve. Surely the recent emphasis on frameworks over fundamentals has been a major contributor to the Web full of bland, practically identical…
>Surely the recent emphasis on frameworks over fundamentals has been a major contributor to the Web full of bland, practically identical sites that we see today. It used to be mostly plaintext and basic colors with no responsiveness, under construction gifs, basic images, and flashing text. Before that, just text. We're still learning as an industry. Web technology has not (and may never) settled like the hardware in…
I think you overlooked about a decade where we'd moved well beyond slightly annotated text but hadn't yet entered the era of framework dominance. The Web was a smaller place then, but IMHO a much more interesting one in terms of trying out different designs and interaction styles.
As for productivity vs. possibility, I certainly don't dispute that productivity is one place where the money is[1]. However, that doesn't mean there isn't also room for innovation, and it certainly doesn't mean there's no money in doing things better than what you can achieve with Bootstrap, Angular, and a couple of junior developers who don't know much else. In an increasingly monotone and commoditised technology field, more interesting and/or effective presentation can certainly be a USP.
[1] I might question how sustainable that productivity proves to be over the longer term with many framework-heavy projects, but that's a separate issue and probably not worth getting distracted here.
Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody wants to understand how CSS works. Sometimes we have to, but it's rarely by choice.
I respectfully disagree. I'd much prefer to understand the real technologies that run the web -- HTML, CSS, HTTP, and so on -- and then use tools and build abstractions on top when it's useful. Starting with some specific framework or tool set inevitably limits what you can achieve. Surely the recent emphasis on frameworks over fundamentals has been a major contributor to the Web full of bland, practically identical…
I think you missed the point of the post you're replying to. What's the reason that you feel that you want to understand the "real technologies" that run the web? So that you can build better apps with those technologies, right?
So, what you really want to do is just build some apps, not learn CSS. See the difference?
Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be worried they were asking about clearfix as opposed to flexbox.
I'd be worried about both! If you have to clear a float, you can do it even more cleanly in CSS by using a psuedo element. The old trick was to set `overflow: hidden` on the element containing floated items so it would always expand to contain it - but then things like box-shadows get cut off by the containing element. To get around this, you can use an `:after` pseudo-element on the element that contains the float i…
"I'd be worried about both! If you have to clear a float..."
Why? I haven't needed to use floats at all since moving to flexbox.