Specializing yourself into a corner by Scott Kellum

Using the platform

Elise Hein documents what it was like to build a website (or web app, if you prefer) the stackless way:

• use custom elements (for modular HTML without frameworks)
• use the in-browser package manager (for JavaScript packages without build tools)
• match pages with files (to avoid routing and simplify architecture)
• stick to standards (to avoid obsolescence and framework fatigue)

Her conclusions are similar to my own: ES6 modules mean you can kiss your bundler goodbye; web components are a mixed bag—it’s frustrating that Apple are refusing to allow native elements to be extended. Interestingly, Elise feels that a CSS preprocessor is still needed for her because she wants to be able to nest selectors …but even that’s on its way now!

Perhaps we might get to the stage where it isn’t an automatic default to assume you’ll need bundling, concatenation, transpiling, preprocessing, and all those other tasks that we’ve become dependent on build tools for.

I have a special disdain for beginner JavaScript tutorials that have you run create-react-app as the first step, and this exercise has only strengthened my conviction that every beginner programmer should get to grips with HTML, CSS and vanilla JS before delving into frameworks. Features native to the web are what all frameworks share, and knowing the platform makes for a stronger foundation in the face of change.

Sass Selectors: To Nest Or Not To Nest? | Brad Frost

The fascinating results of Brad’s survey.

Personally, I’m not a fan of nesting. I feel it obfuscates more than helps. And it makes searching for a specific selector tricky.

That said, Danielle feels quite strongly that nesting is the way to go, so on Clearleft projects, that’s how we write Sass + BEM.

Nobody Said CSS Is Easy

One thing I gained a stronger awareness of (simply from working with checkboxes) is that it’s important to progressively enhance UI components, so that a fancy custom one is able to fall back to the default browser styles and functionality. This way, a user can still access the UI if JavaScript or CSS fail.

Turning Design Mockups Into Code With Deep Learning - FloydHub Blog

Training a neural network to do front-end development.

I didn’t understand any of this.

Building a webic community

The field of front-end has yet to be defined, because our industry moves too quickly and the range of skills required seems to grow with every passing day. We need to realise that it is impossible to be an expert in every one of those skills, and that’s perfectly fine.