Wrote this five years ago. Then it was Bootstrap and a bunch of JavaScript ninjas that didn’t know HTML/CSS. Now it’s Tailwind and a bunch of React ninjas that see HTML as an implementation detail and CSS as fundamentally broken.
Between the various CSS-in-JS solutions and the use of massive UI frameworks— looking at you MUI— we have taken frontends that could be lightweight, fast-loading, and enjoyable and made them into monstrosities of slowness.
I was looking at a website for a development agency in Atlanta last night and my 8 year old laptop got so hot the fans had to spin up. The website wasn’t even doing much beyond showing some content with some simple animations. I could understand not being able to run the latest games on my laptop but content-centered websites shouldn’t be doing this.
Is there any value in people who cannot write JavaScript?
When every new website on the internet has perfect, semantic, accessible HTML and exceptionally executed, accessible CSS that works on every device and browser, then you can tell me that these languages are not valuable on their own. Until then we need to stop devaluing CSS and HTML.
Preach! It’s all I see these days in job descriptions. JAVASCRIPT! Ninja preferred. Rockstar acceptable. And then they produce crap frontend code. Their HTML and CSS is restricted to Bootstrap at best, custom crap with style attributes all over the place at worst. When I was their age, the emphasis of frontend was on the other side of the triangle: HTML and CSS. Without these, your JavaScript means nothing. Even if you are embedding your CSS and HTML in your JavaScript. Shudder.