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Hire HTML and CSS People

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Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#31

Post by wmil »

windows2020 wrote: post #26
wmil wrote: post #19

I think the issue is that HTML and CSS are awful braindead work that are a career killer. If you hire developers who know HTML and CSS please rotate in some more interesting work for them. Also be careful not to elevate the design team above people doing the HTML / CSS. Too often the design people go back and forth with a higher up until an "approved final design" that makes no sense gets thrown in the laps of the de…

Writing consistent, concise and elegant HTML and CSS takes practice. Mastery of a language and discovery of its patterns requires thought.

I'm not seeing how that relates to my comment.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#32

Post by afloatboat »

I wish! I love working with HTML and CSS, but every front end job is covered by the blanket term “front end” that considers you as much a JavaScript ‘architect’ as they do a UI developer. Not realising that this does not make the slightest sense.

Can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to tell experienced developers they should use anchors to link to other pages and not an onClick. Those same people are much better in architecting then I will ever be, yet technically we have the same job description.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#33

Post by arp242 »

notpushkin wrote: post #16
Epskampie wrote: post #4

I know CSS quite well, as I've been working with it over 15 years. I've been surprised that new programmers hardly know it at all, and heavily lean on component libraries or css frameworks. Can see why though, css has become very large and complex, and it's only getting worse. The upside is that my simple fixes sometimes seem like a superpower to others.

> css has become very large and complex Respectfully disagree. I think CSS is simpler than ever, and it’s only getting more streamlined and powerful. E.g. what used to be a complex blob of floats is now a simple grid layout.

The difficult part of CSS is that there is quite a lot of it, and that quite a lot of features have weird interactions, and browsers have real bugs surrounding all of that.

Take "position: sticky" for example; a fairly simple feature, and it simplifies stuff because previously folks were doing that with JS.

But also: there are tons of cases where it doesn't work, or where it works in unexpected ways. A few years ago I compiled a issues with position:sticky, and the number of caveats and bugs in both Firefox and Chrome was absolutely bewildering (I'm not sure if I still have the list somewhere).

This is the sort of thing that makes CSS difficult and complex. Originally HTML/CSS was just a simple text rendering system. So much stuff has been slowly bolted on, not always in the best way.

Other than that I do agree with you. "Just align stuff with flexbox" is kind-of my go-to way of doing CSS these days (I never really got around to looking at grid), and it's a massive time-saver over using hacky float stuff. And having one box model for all browsers also saves a lot of headaches. Hell, I read we're finally getting vertical alignment!

But also: there is a lot of complexity that can really bite you in the arse and make life difficult.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#34

Post by smarkov »

notpushkin wrote: post #16
Epskampie wrote: post #4

I know CSS quite well, as I've been working with it over 15 years. I've been surprised that new programmers hardly know it at all, and heavily lean on component libraries or css frameworks. Can see why though, css has become very large and complex, and it's only getting worse. The upside is that my simple fixes sometimes seem like a superpower to others.

> css has become very large and complex Respectfully disagree. I think CSS is simpler than ever, and it’s only getting more streamlined and powerful. E.g. what used to be a complex blob of floats is now a simple grid layout.

> what used to be a complex blob of floats is now a simple grid layout.

And what used to be relatively simple static layouts designed for a 4:3 screen are now layouts that must accommodate a screen of any arbitrary aspect ratio and physical size. This means that most of your components will now have at least 2 layout states, one for desktop and one for mobile, usually horizontal and vertical respectively, accomplished by switching random layout related properties on and off. Arguably anything related to CSS layout comes with a ton of quirks and flex/grid are no exception. It's those quirks that put most people off CSS, because they're sometimes far from intuitive, hard to debug, and are just things you have to know.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#35

Post by ffsm8 »

al_borland wrote: post #29
legitster wrote: post #18

I'm a crusty old HTML and CSS person. The problem is that most of the skills are in the marketing department - not engineering. I've noticed lately a huge "React-ification" in the past few years where the UI on apps are both getting overly designed, but also more confusing and worse. Bigger buttons, bigger text, overuse of whitespace, bad pagination and breadcrumbs, etc. There are a lot of best practices that were "s…

> I asked them if they were using a CSS framework at all and the response was "we are using React, we don't need one". This hurt my brain. I recently saw a video where a guy was claiming that people who had gone through a web development bootcamp (using React and the whole nine), where unable to make a basic hello world HTML file. When people don’t know the basics, it’s no wonder everything is over complicated. They…

> This hurt my brain.

Why? It's straight up correct.

Sure, you could still use a css framework, but you really don't need to once you're using any frontend library.

Each component comes with it's own styles, that makes the css framework redundant, as a component library gives you a better development experience with the same effect.

Add a few global vars for theme colorings, default spacing etc and it becomes pretty straightforward to maintain a coherent UI even across repositories/teams (or distribute a tailwind config,works even better imo)

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#36

Post by arp242 »

wmil wrote: post #19

I think the issue is that HTML and CSS are awful braindead work that are a career killer. If you hire developers who know HTML and CSS please rotate in some more interesting work for them. Also be careful not to elevate the design team above people doing the HTML / CSS. Too often the design people go back and forth with a higher up until an "approved final design" that makes no sense gets thrown in the laps of the de…

In general I think the "design team" should be the "HTML and CSS" people.

Today, by "design" people often mean "graphical design", which tends to attract more art-type people. But what is really needed is "UI design", which is a much broader discipline which involves art, technical stuff, and psychology. You need to think about "what looks good?", but also "what makes a good UI for our product", and "what can we reasonably implement without too much complexity?"

Certainly in my experience this confusion between "graphical design" and "UI design" seems to be a huge chunk of the problem.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#37

Post by arp242 »

windows2020 wrote: post #26
wmil wrote: post #19

I think the issue is that HTML and CSS are awful braindead work that are a career killer. If you hire developers who know HTML and CSS please rotate in some more interesting work for them. Also be careful not to elevate the design team above people doing the HTML / CSS. Too often the design people go back and forth with a higher up until an "approved final design" that makes no sense gets thrown in the laps of the de…

Writing consistent, concise and elegant HTML and CSS takes practice. Mastery of a language and discovery of its patterns requires thought.

I think the point that was being made is "if you hire HTML/CSS people, then don't make them monkeys that are only allowed to blindly follow instructions, but involve them in the process and treat them as professionals". Or at least, that's how I read it anyway.

So basically, I think you agree with the previous poster?

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#38

Post by Spivak »

al_borland wrote: post #29
legitster wrote: post #18

I'm a crusty old HTML and CSS person. The problem is that most of the skills are in the marketing department - not engineering. I've noticed lately a huge "React-ification" in the past few years where the UI on apps are both getting overly designed, but also more confusing and worse. Bigger buttons, bigger text, overuse of whitespace, bad pagination and breadcrumbs, etc. There are a lot of best practices that were "s…

> I asked them if they were using a CSS framework at all and the response was "we are using React, we don't need one". This hurt my brain. I recently saw a video where a guy was claiming that people who had gone through a web development bootcamp (using React and the whole nine), where unable to make a basic hello world HTML file. When people don’t know the basics, it’s no wonder everything is over complicated. They…

It's kinda right. React says manage complexity through encapsulation, CSS as intended to be used says impale straight through the layers via global namespace and a brittle rats nest of interdependency via the side-channel of selectors.

CSS as simply a DSL for styling components and hooks into the layout engine like how other GUI frameworks work is fine, but you don't need a framework for that.

We all generally agree that inheritance is hard to keep clean but in CSS it's venerated for some reason.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#39

Post by beretguy »

notpushkin wrote: post #16
Epskampie wrote: post #4

I know CSS quite well, as I've been working with it over 15 years. I've been surprised that new programmers hardly know it at all, and heavily lean on component libraries or css frameworks. Can see why though, css has become very large and complex, and it's only getting worse. The upside is that my simple fixes sometimes seem like a superpower to others.

> css has become very large and complex Respectfully disagree. I think CSS is simpler than ever, and it’s only getting more streamlined and powerful. E.g. what used to be a complex blob of floats is now a simple grid layout.

Yup. Variables, imports, i think nested declarations are also available now, less browser specific prefixes, this semicolon ":" selectors, etc. CSS have only become easier and more powerful.
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