The quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend
The quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend
I keep noticing those of us in the frontend field being treated much the same as nurses, paralegals, and executive assistants. Our work is seen as important, certainly, but just not the same as, or as important as, the “real” work.
An interesting read. Of course just an personal opinion as the author said, but I think he is correct in lots of his points.
I noticed that I think / feel like this myself sometimes, even while I'm a frontend dev myself.
Fortunately I'm in a nice team that values my frontend skills that all the other full stack/ Backend devs are missing.
Did you notice this bias / devaluing of the frontend work yourself?
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I expected this to be about consequences of enshittification, where interfaces and design have been run the fuck over by a constant mindless demand to feed Engagemagog. Hard to justify elegant design or retain worthwhile front-end developers when you're just telling them to shovel popups and flyovers into victims' eyeballs.
Instead it's a CSS guy blithely complaining about CSS's reputation.
I notice CSS is widely considered some or all of the following: unmaintainable; subjective; messy; unruly; unpredictable; a footgun; overly complicated; unscalable; and a nightmare.
Well yes, but have you seen how people describe Javascript?
But despite all these claims, CSS is also somehow “not a real programming language.”
It literally isn't. "Same with HTML." Markup is not programming, even if it is code. If it's Turing-complete then that's probably a bug. If you want to get clever with a twee definition based on how a programme is just an agenda for the machine, we have a word for that kind of not-an-excutable table-of-contents coding: it's called markup.
It’s like CSS exists in some bizarre quantum state; somehow both too complex to use, yet too simple to take seriously, all at once.
Being a pain in the ass is not a contradiction.
(Really; you’d probably be astounded how many ways there are to utterly destroy anything on the web with hardly any CSS.)
... why would people be surprised by that, given CSS's reputation? Everyone's dorked with F12 and gone 'now why's it done that?' thanks to instant visual feedback. Hence the reputation.
We might not ever say it, or even think it, but when we cast some people as heroes, we relegate others to the role of the sidekick—even though their labor is no less important, and they do at least as much to push the work toward success.
Your job is literally optional. Sites without CSS are not pretty, but pretty is a want, not a need. The people who make the content of the website are usually capable of half-assing a modicum of presentation... writers moreso than programmers, because engineer art is very not good. We'll figure out that spinner while the video loads, but it'll be purple and orange. If we didn't, though - the video still loads. The blog is still in English. The shopping cart still appears, even if the table is 4000px wide with ridge borders straight out of Netscape.
The idea that other engineers are smart—even smarter than we are—is the kind of stereotype that feels so common and true it’s rarely even questioned.
Now - essentialism is even worse than the author makes out here. Judging a person based on the relative importance of their work is close to bigotry. You don't have to be smart to do Javascript instead of CSS. (Arguably that choice says the opposite.) But we are still comparing the part of the site that does all the stuff, and making that part look nice.
“Here; other people already made this.” (i.e., they already did the real work.) “Now we just need you to fix it up.”
I wish technical debt only happened to markup people.
I'm a scientist, and "Not a real programming language" gives me big vibes of arguing that a thing is a science (usually economics) because they're using "is a science" as a proxy when they actually mean to say that their field is important and valuable.
I've dabbled enough with CSS that I know how much I don't know, and I don't think respect for a skillset is (or should be) measured by whether a thing is a "real programming language"
You cannot write a program in CSS. It is not a programming language.
Look:
Computer science precisely classifies things that are almost computers.
There's a hierarchy that has nothing to do with clout. It's a genuine field of study. It's even one of the freaky ones where the landmark name isn't a computer scientist, but Noam yes-that-one Chomsky. The linguist.
We say a type of machine recognizes a language. Famously, "you can't parse HTML with regexes," because regular expressions are a specific grammar that does not allow self-reference. Added regex features like lookahead only extend it into context-sensitive grammar.
I'm pretty sure HTML is even less than that. This comment sent me sixteen Wikipedia tabs deep to double-check, and I started drinking around number eight. But I feel confident saying you also could not parse a regex, with HTML. Even the delightful wackaloons who get Powerpower to act Turing-complete could only half-ass it out of HTML by including CSS and a human hitting tab-space-tab-space.
It's not a value judgement, when we say CSS and HTML are not programming languages. And we're not just being pedantic toward you. Again: have you seen what we say about Javascript? This is how we are.
To be clear, I'm in agreement with you that CSS and HTML are not programming languages and also that saying that isn't a value judgement.
I’m a scientist, and “Not a real programming language” gives me big vibes of arguing that a thing is a science
CSS is not a programming language. Neither is HTML.
This, however does not take away from its importance or the skillsets and expertise required to use it effectively.
What a weird belief: thinking the value they bring to a project is tied to whether they use programming languages or not. The majority of people working with programming languages are already bad at it. Why is it being used as a badge of honor?
Is this a "living in glass houses" scenario?