Appreciate Your Front End Specialists
The glory of web design obviously goes off to the graphic designers. The blood and guts of web design bends towards the backend programmers. And the new geeky cool of web design gets into the ground of usability specialists and information architects.
What about appreciating the good old (X)HTML and CSS people that glue it all together? The value of POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML) is under-rated in nearly every commercial / educational relationship I inhabit. It’s low tech. It’s beneath the radar. Its what kiddies do when they first want to make a web page – if they’re too dumb to use Facebook.
When you’re forced to do about 12 to 16 hours of totally avoidable Quality Assurance on 5 pages of web forms delivering radio fields via switch cases in PHP it makes you appreciate the high quality front end specialist. That person wouldn’t have cost me over a day of my life by saving themselves a few minutes research about how to markup a web page semantically. POSH – and how hard can it be? For some reason the blood and guts of design people just don’t get the importance of high quality, smick, state of the art semantic front end code. They even go so far as to say they’ve validated these pages already via the W3C HTML Validator as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Obviously someone has been tolling on my little joy boy for that to be true.
I’m very sad for the people who just don’t get things like quality of workmanship. Or accessibility, or even usability. Because some people don’t get it and never will. Not because they’re evil they just don’t get it. Whereas I think I heard one talk on the subject and I got it straight away. In fact I was indignant. How could I ever be expected to not want to provide the best product out there? So, whatever you do today, give your front end specialists a big hug. The HTML, CSS and JavaScripters.
Give them the time of day and appreciate what they’re bringing to your project.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:30 am
Easily the nicest thing I’ve read so far today – nice one!
May 19th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Easily the truest thing about web design / development today. Quite often the (X)HTML is provided by the PHP / ASP developers who are busy thinking in for loops and functions. Different task environment so “user experience”, “quality of code” and “accessibility” aren’t on their radar.
God help ‘em we need the blighters to make us look good with functionality, don’t get me wrong. But nearly every instance where the subject comes to the table there’s almost a mocking of HTML / CSS.
Everyone says, yeh we know how to write HTML and CSS. That’s easy. Anyone can chump that together. “We” write backend mysterious magic… ha ha.
So, anyone reading this, big hug day for us under appreciated tree hugging standardistas ay…
We are the ones who want something that does a little more than “just work”. Mmm quality.
May 19th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
“What about appreciating the good old (X)HTML and CSS people that glue it all together?” – Those geeks just don’t get any of the good new buzzwords.
May 19th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Good thing then that I have experience both on the front and back end, erm… I hope that is not misinterpreted.
Anyway, I love it when my php integrates almost seamlessly with the front end thanks to well thought out and semantic html/css. I think both sides lose out when they don’t know or care to know enough about the other.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Too true Roberto. And back end programmers who take the time to actually produce decent quality markup are worth their weight in gold, we should add.
Still, I’m seeing a bit nowdays that unless someone has that skillset as a PHP programmer, at least, they’re finding it difficult to get work. Nobody with a decent application to build wants it just trashed with break tags, invalid junk and unmaintainable practices. So there’s hope at least.
I think its about caring, too. Some of what attracts a certain type to programming is perhaps feel distanced from the “real site” or “real application interface”. They like for loops, abstractions and cunningly thought out algorithmic finesse. Although that may be an unfair generalisation.
I guess I sit somewhere in the mishmash of generalist with specialised interest areas… I hope.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
We should have a day and wear special t-shirts (and beat the shit out of anyone who disagrees with us or won’t wear the t-shirts or won’t pay up)… yeah !!!
May 19th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
SEO Gal, ha ha. I think SEO is another of those unsung areas of front end goodness too. How often do we meet people who go SEO? Particularly when it comes to backend programmers thinking how to get functionality not necessarily how to effectively code the site or get it properly indexed so there is ROI. God forbid.
A big group hug for SEO people too today.