CHAPTER 1 Modern CSS Architecture and Front-End Development
tunate, though, in hindsight, probably not unexpected byproduct of the
Industrial Revolution.
The machines being introduced could do the work of ten skilled
workers, and at ten times the pace. Their slow, handcrafted work was
being replaced with the desire for more powerful and profitable means of
production. This shift, naturally, didn’t sit so well with the workers, who in-
creasingly found themselves ousted from roles they had held for decades.
The Luddites are a shining example of people resisting change, and paying
dearly for it. Change is good, change is difficult, change is necessary, and
change will happen — it’s how we deal with it that counts.
The Web is changing. Are you keeping up?The Web Then
There was a time (not so long ago, really) when websites were built using
tables for structure, and markup like <font color="red">Foo</font > was
used to apply purely visual features. These techniques stayed around for
quite a long time.
I started to get into Web development quite recently, around 2007 or so.
I was incredibly lucky that the days of tables for layout were long gone, and
I strode straight into an arena where technologies like CSS were consid-
ered the standard. Each article I read spoke of semantics, clean HTML, and
using as few IDs and classes as possible.
CSS made its entrance years before my interest in building websites.
Tables were phased out and replaced with a far more powerful and suitable
language. For many this was a huge change from what they were used to;
for me it was just how things were done when I arrived on the scene. The
transition from table-based to CSS-based layouts seemed, on the whole,
a welcome change. It took a while for some developers to make the move
because, as is always the case with front-end development, people were
largely at the mercy of the browsers their audiences were using.