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by solardev 981 days ago
Frontend dev, and the others I've met seem to just read a few pages on MDN and Stack and wing it from there, lol. I wish there was a good book on the engineering side of it. The UX side of it has a few good titles, but the dev side is pretty messy.
1 comments
austin-cheney 981 days ago
There is: DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith.

https://www.amazon.com/DOM-Scripting-Design-JavaScript-Docum...

But, nobody will read it. Tree models irrationally scare the shit out of most developers. Most people would rather cut off an arm and work 10x harder for less money than navigate a tree. It’s super weird.

However, if you are a person who isn’t autistically riddled with fears you lie to yourself about understanding the DOM opens almost all doors on the frontend, such as: accessibility, SEO, A/B testing, test automation, performance, and writing durable code quickly without need for a framework.

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solardev 981 days ago
I couldn't find a preview for the 2nd edition, but the 1st edition seemed quite out of date?

The frontend work I tend to be dealing with at this point in my career usually involve proper web "apps" (dashboards, visualizations, editors, etc) rather than the web "pages" that the DOM was well suited for. The main difference is the need for client-side state and realtime interactivity that doesn't need a full backend rerender every time. Yes you can write all that in plain JS but at some level of complexity you'd just be reinventing your own framework.

What I'd like to see isn't so much getting rid of all the frameworks in favor of vanillajs (unless ecma improves it dramatically), but a good guide on how to integrate the various pieces of modern frameworks in a neat and maintainable way. I'm not sure that it's really doable right now given the pace of change and how quickly everything becomes obsolete. Clean Code has some interesting ideas but isn't exactly a drop in fit to the JS ecosystem.

Anyway, just thinking out loud...

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austin-cheney 980 days ago
Think about it like this: Proper web apps means SPA, which means some giant stupid framework (Angular, React, Vue). These frameworks solve only two problems: architecture in a box and putting text on screen. They really don’t do anything else. That is why most frontend developers can’t do anything else.

The compile target of the browser is the DOM. This is just as true now as it was in 1998. If you want to do more than put text on screen you need to dive deeper. Your giant framework won’t/can’t give you that.

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