I love, love, love this encounter that Stephanie had with high school students when she showed them her own website (“Your website? You have a website?”).
I opened the DevTools on my site and there was an audible gasp from the class and excited murmuring.
“That’s your code?” A student asked. “Yes, that’s all my code!” “You wrote all of that?!” “Yes, it’s my website.”
And the class kind of exploded and starting talking amongst themselves. I was floored and my perspective readjusted.
When I code, it’s usually in HTML and CSS, and I suppose there’s a part of me that feels like that isn’t special because some tech bros decide to be vocal and loud about HTML and CSS not being special nearly everyday (it is special and tech bros can shut up.)
And the response from that class of high school students delighted me and grounded me in a way I haven’t experienced before. What I view as a simple code was absolute magic to them. And for all of us who code, I think we forget it is magic. Computational magic but still magic. HTML and CSS are magic.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
This is a guide to how to be a web developer.
Really good advice from Laurie.
What this site is not is a tutorial. Tutorials are very specific to a time and a technology. This is intended to be a guide to tell you all the things you can learn, so you can then go off and learn them.
This is a really thoughtful look at the evolution of CSS and the ever-present need to balance power with learnability.
When haters deny HTML’s status as a programming language, they’re showing they don’t understand what a language really is. Language is not instructing an interlocutor what to do in a way that leaves no room for other interpretations; it is better and richer than that. Like human language, HTML is conversational. It is remarkably adept at adapting to context. It can take a different shape on any machine, from a desktop browser or an e-reader screen to a mobile app or a screen reader for the blind (so long as that device is built to present hypertext).
Hell, yeah!
Ultimately, even as HTML has become the province of professionals, it cannot be gatekept. This is what makes so many programmers so anxious about the web, and sometimes pathetically desperate to maintain the all-too-real walls they’ve erected between software engineers and web developers.
Hell, yeeeeaaaaahhh!!!
What other programmers might say dismissively is something HTML lovers embrace: Anyone can do it. Whether we’re using complex frameworks or very simple tools, HTML’s promise is that we can build, make, code, and do anything we want.
Anselm isn’t talking about becoming a CSS wizard, but simply having an understanding of what CSS can do. I have had similar experiences to this:
In the past years I had various situations where TypeScript developers (they called themselves) approached me and asked whether I could help them out with CSS. I expected to solve a complex problem but for me — knowing CSS very well — it was always a simple, straightforward solution or code snippet.
Let’s face it, “full stack” usually means “JavaScript”—HTML and CSS aren’t considered worthy of consideration. Their loss.
The paradigm shift that web development is entering hinges on the fact that while React was a key enabler of the Single-Page-App and Component era of the web, in practice it normally tends to result in extremely poor products. Built-in browser APIs are now much more capable than they were when React was first invented.
Celebrating ten years of the wonderful community event.
Had you heard of these bits of CSS? Me too/neither!
I never would’ve known about the `display-mode` media feature if I hadn’t been writing about it.
CSS logical properties here, they just aren’t evenly distributed yet.
…of the T-shirt.