[bobthepanda]

The blessing and curse of frontend development is that there basically isn't a barrier to entry given that you can make some basic CSS/JS/HTML and have your browser render it immediately.

There's also the flavor of frontend developer that came from the backend and sneers at actually having to learn frontend because "it's not real development"

[zelphirkalt]

Ha, that's a funny attitude. And here I was thinking, that mostly doing backend work, I rather make the best out of the situation, if I have to do frontend dev, and try to do "real development" by writing trivial things myself, instead of worsening the situation by gluing together mountains of bloat.

[pxc]

> There's also the flavor of frontend developer that came from the backend and sneers at actually having to learn frontend because "it's not real development"

What kind of code does this developer write?

[garbagepatch]

As little code as possible to get the job done without enormous dependencies. Avoiding js and using css and html as much as possible.

[sfn42]

Sounds like the perfect frontend dev to me.

[cluckindan]

The designer, the customer, and US/EU accessibility laws heavily disagree.

[whstl]

The designer already disagrees with accessibility laws. Contrast is near zero.

[zelphirkalt]

The designer might only disagree, if they know a lot about frontend technology, and are not merely clicking together a figma castle.

But the middle management might actually praise the developer, because they "get the job done" with the minimal effort (so "efficient"!).

[Philadelphia]

How is javascript required for accessibility? I wasn’t aware of that.

[boesboes]

It is not. In fact, it is all the modern design sensibilities and front-end frameworks that make it nearly impossible to make accessible things.

We once had the rule HTML should be purely semantic and all styling should be in CSS. It was brilliant, even though not everything looked as fancy as today.

[bigstrat2003]

As the customer, I think that's the perfect frontend dev. Fuck the JS monstrosities that people build, they are so much harder to use than plain HTML.

[sfn42]

A11y is mostly handled by just using semantic html.

The designer, in my experience, is totally fine with just using a normal select element, they don't demand that I reinvent the drop-down with divs just to put rounded corners on the options.

Nobody cares about that stuff. These are minor details, we can change it later if someone really wants it. As long as we're not just sitting on our hands for lack of work I'm not putting effort into reinventing things the browser has already solved.

[zelphirkalt]

I hope in the future I can work with that kind of designer. Maybe it is just my limited experience, but in that limited experience, web designers care way too much about details and design features/ideas/concepts, that are not part of HTML or CSS and then frontend developers would have to push back and tell the web designer, that form follows function and that the medium they design for is important. Basic design principles actually, that the designers should know themselves, just like they should know the medium they are targeting (semandic HTML, CSS, capabilities of them both, a tiny bit about JS too), to keep things reasonable. But most frontend devs are happy to build fancy things with JS instead of pushing back when it matters. And not so many frontend devs want to get into CSS deeply and do everything they can to avoid JS. So needless things do get implemented all the time.

[cluckindan]

The word ”mostly” is the crux of the issue.

[NackerHughes]

The designer wants huge amounts of screen space wasted on unnnecessary padding, massive Fisher-Price rounded corners, and fancy fading and sliding animations that get in the way and slow things down. (Moreover, the designer just happens to want to completely re-design everything a few months later.)

The customer “ooh”s and “aah”s at said fancy animations running on the salesman’s top of the line macbook pro and is lured in, only realising too late that they’ve been bitten in the ass by the enormous amount of bloat that makes it run like a potato on any computer that costs less than four thousand dollars.

And US/EU laws are written by clueless bureaucrats whose most recent experience with technology is not even an electric typewriter.

What’s your point?

[wvh]

I think their point is that you might not have much of a choice, taking laws and modern aesthetic and economic concerns into consideration.

We "in the know" might agree, but we're not going to get it sold.

[wbl]

I think blind people should be able to use websites.

[cluckindan]

Wow, those are some jaded and cynical views.

[bobthepanda]

In my experience, generally speaking there is a kind of this developer that tries to write a language they’re familiar with, but in Javascript. As the pithy saying goes, it takes a lot of skill to write Java in every language.

[lodovic]

Usually they write only prompts and then accept whatever is generated, ignoring all typing and linting issues

[2muchcoffeeman]

Prompts? React and Angular came out over 10 years ago. The left pad incident happened in 2016.

Let me assure you, devs were skeptical about all this well before AI.