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Hire HTML and CSS People

robinrendle.com

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Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#41

Post by beretguy »

afloatboat wrote: post #32

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…

> use anchors to link to other pages and not an onClick

That's beyond bizarre.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#42

Post by pcthrowaway »

beretguy wrote: post #39
notpushkin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Easier to use well is not the same as easier to learn well.

In a sense it's easier to use if you follow the happy path, and have a good resource of what's on that happy path.

It's harder to use if working with legacy software, or don't have a good guide to stay on the happy path.

There are also more concepts overall to learn from box model and stacking context to flow layout, flex, grid, compositing, and isolation than there were 15 years ago. Some of these can replace previous concepts like float and table based layouts, but overall I'd say the barrier to expertise is higher.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#43

Post by pcthrowaway »

pier25 wrote: post #24
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.

> I've been surprised that new programmers hardly know it at all Not saying TW doesn't have some merits but probably the biggest reason for its adoption is people avoiding to learn CSS. Reminds me of Mongo over a decade ago. There was a huge influx of devs getting into backend with Node who didn't want to learn SQL. So they went with Mongo because it was easier to get started. And for a couple of years now there's be…

Tailwind doesn't prevent you from "learning css". It may prevent you from learning some legacy things which are best avoided these days, like float though.

You can't use tailwind without either understanding CSS or learning it as you use it. I have to wonder if people who claim otherwise haven't used tailwind.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#44

Post by afloatboat »

beretguy wrote: post #41
afloatboat wrote: post #32

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…

> use anchors to link to other pages and not an onClick That's beyond bizarre.

Not if you consider that a lot of front end developers today started learning web development through JavaScript.

I started around 2000, when people were still using tables for layout and CSS was pretty new. If you wanted interactivity you relied on the built-in tools on the web because there was no other choice (apart from something more extreme like Java applets or Flash).

Today’s web developer starts with something like React, learns JSX instead of HTML and doesn’t need the form tag or checkboxes/radiobuttions/select because they have useState, onClick and className to highlight whatever they think is active. I’ve been working as a React consultant for +6 years now, and every PR I see has the same issues.

I wish I was lying about the onClick on anchor tags, and for primary navigation it’s usually done right. But once they see a block link that contains multiple components (a “card”) the mind always seems to jump to onClicks that call navigate.

A more advanced error is when something is an anchor, they correctly implement the a tag with an onClick and preventDedault, but they forget to check if the user is holding down shift, hyper or control or if they pressed any other than the primary mouse button to try and open the link in a different tab/window.

Semantics in general is a lost art as well. A Text component that only returns p or spans is used for titles, they don’t consider hierarchy at all.

To be fair, there is so much logic in the client now that I understand that people with different ambitions have taken an interest in it. The only problem is that companies just blindly hire for front end developers without considering the different expertises.

I think this is the root cause for a lot of the complaints HN has about JS. I want to build good UI and UX, but there’s so much other work and configuration that I’m expected to work on, in a limited timeframe to not ruin my velocity that I just never get to it.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#45

Post by al_borland »

ffsm8 wrote: post #35
al_borland wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That’s assuming they are using a component library that has a common system for its styles. If their end result was an inconsistent UI, it doesn’t sound like they were. They could have been making their own components, or mixing component libraries, with inconsistent styles, based on whatever the first search result was for their need.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#46

Post by JohnTHaller »

karaterobot wrote: post #25
notpushkin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's getting more powerful than ever, and it's easier to do things that used to be hard (vertically centering, etc.), but it's also got a lot more capabilities that have a learning curve (custom properties, color functions, container queries, etc.). I've been writing CSS since 1997, and I remember having to use invalid characters to fork CSS in the days of IE 6, and all the old school hacks involving floats, full-hei…

> I remember having to use invalid characters to fork CSS in the days of IE 6

I just twitched a bit reading that

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#47

Post by pier25 »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #43
pier25 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been surprised that new programmers hardly know it at all Not saying TW doesn't have some merits but probably the biggest reason for its adoption is people avoiding to learn CSS. Reminds me of Mongo over a decade ago. There was a huge influx of devs getting into backend with Node who didn't want to learn SQL. So they went with Mongo because it was easier to get started. And for a couple of years now there's be…

Tailwind doesn't prevent you from "learning css". It may prevent you from learning some legacy things which are best avoided these days, like float though. You can't use tailwind without either understanding CSS or learning it as you use it. I have to wonder if people who claim otherwise haven't used tailwind.

I think you're overestimating how many (most?) TW users operate.

I've seen first hand people just brute forcing by copying and pasting random stuff they see online.

And let's not forget about TW UI which is basically a way to copy and paste stuff without understanding a thing.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#48

Post by kibibu »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #46
karaterobot wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's getting more powerful than ever, and it's easier to do things that used to be hard (vertically centering, etc.), but it's also got a lot more capabilities that have a learning curve (custom properties, color functions, container queries, etc.). I've been writing CSS since 1997, and I remember having to use invalid characters to fork CSS in the days of IE 6, and all the old school hacks involving floats, full-hei…

> I remember having to use invalid characters to fork CSS in the days of IE 6 I just twitched a bit reading that

There were differences between IE on Windows, IE for Mac (which had an entirely different engine), Netscape, Gecko, and Safari.

If you needed to work around them, you could either sniff user agents, or abuse parsing inconsistencies to hide rules from each.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#49

Post by solardev »

legitster wrote: post #23
solardev wrote: post #8

This has nothing to do with HTML or CSS vs any other language of the web. It should be "Prioritize frontend usability and design." For that you need good UX/UI people, who may or may not know HTML or CSS. It doesn't matter. Any competent frontend dev can copy a good Figma, but not every HTML/CSS/Tailwind/JS dev can make a pretty, usable, accessible website. If you think about your frontend primarily in terms of how "…

> Any competent frontend dev can copy a good Figma I think that's part of the problem. If UX people don't know code and code people don't know UX, neither has the ability to validate each other's work.

That's never been a problem in my experience...? As a frontend dev, I routinely work with designers who can't code. They send me a Figma, maybe talk me through the highlights, and I implement an initial prototype that gets maybe 80-90% there. A little back and forth later and we have something that's like 99% there, with minor bugs we fix after release. They didn't need to know any HTML or CSS. Figma puts pretty good guardrails around their design possibilities already.
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