[bpatrianakos]

I think you're looking at this all wrong. Front end development is not a problem that needs solving. It's already been solved. We have html markup for content, CSS for design, and JavaScript for interactivity. Problem solved. Now within front end development there are a number of other problems that need to be solved and that's why we have these different front end resources. So we can use the tools that solved the problem of getting content on the screen to achieve certain more specific goals. Some of these resources solve the same problem in different ways and some are for niche problems. Either way the fact that these exist shows that front end technologies have done their job well. They're versatile enough to handle a wide range of uses.

Front end tools aren't perfect but that's why they've been iterated upon. And what language doesn't have shortcomings? It's amazing that people have created these tools that are flexible enough to be used in seemingly infinite ways without being too narrowly focused or being all things to all people.

But I think I'm getting ahead of myself. Where's the mess you're talking about? This is a common thing to say among non web devs but I never can get any specifics. If you approach front end development the way you would back end or desktop development you're going to have problems. It's a totally different way of thinking.

[andrewflnr]

JavaScript and CSS stink in a lot of ways. CSS is pretty messy if you want to do something slightly weird or complicated, which is a large part of why we have frameworks for grids instead of just being able to write one. It seems you have to do this weird "margin: 0 auto" trick to center things sometimes. Last I heard, the only way to get something vertically centered is to make it a table cell and use "vertical-align: center" or something like that. A lot of the interesting CSS properties are inconsistently supported and/or have vendor prefixes; can you use border-radius yet and expect it to work in the big three browsers? If you want a page that fits in the window with a fixed footer, you have to use JS hacks to make it work (actually I don't think I ever got it right). Just the other day a friend of mine had to do some weird hack where he detected the width of the window and set CSS accordingly to make things work right on mobile devices. Honestly, browser inconsistency is half the problem.

As for JS itself, I'll just defer to Douglas Crockford and the infamous wat talk: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat .

If you want more, the HTML and SVG DOMs are not properly integrated. It turns out to be nearly impossible to have a functioning textarea inside SVG, or indeed any form of wrapped text. God knows I tried with Chrome and Firefox, and apparently it just gets worse with IE. I'm sure I'll encounter more irritants as I go on, or maybe someone else can chime in with something specific they encountered this week. Probably the reason you don't hear more specifics is that most of the irritations fade into the background as you work around them, leaving only a vague dissatisfaction.

Now granted, this is all much better than nothing. I know the web has enabled all kinds of cool things, which is the only reason anyone bothers to develop it. But I think it's absurd to call front-end dev a "solved problem", at least in any sense meant to silence pointing out potential improvements.

[da_n]

I always feel like browser inconsistencies are a bit like print, every print shop seems to have different requirements about colours, gutter, trim, quiet areas etc so even in the real world consistency is not guaranteed. I find if you use something like SASS with Compass/Bourbon you don't need to think about vendor prefixes.

[andrewflnr]

You're making my point for me about CSS: it's symptomatic that we need something like SASS to get over browser inconsistency.

[da_n]

Indeed, I wasn't disagreeing, just demonstrating ways around the problem.