By Harry Roberts CHAPTER 1was having to write giant, convoluted selectors to target these orphaned,
unnamed DOM elements. As the saying goes, we robbed Peter to pay Paul.
We were writing clean markup at the cost of writing verbose, messy and
convoluted CSS. We just moved the mess somewhere else.
Today’s Web requires a more informed and less dogmatic view of
things like semantics. We need to realize that our actual code benefits no
one other than other developers, so we need to write it for them. We need
to realize that users and clients just want fast, reliable, robust websites. The
Web is growing bigger and bigger, faster and faster. Code is no longer a
craft, it’s a power tool.
I believe that the sooner we drop these well-intentioned but misguided
ideals of yesteryear, then we can be more liberated and able to build bigger,
better quality sites in a more timely and responsive manner. As I men-
tioned before, it was recognizing and dropping these old-fashioned ideals
that made me the developer I am today.
liSTen To DeveloPeRS
One of the biggest changes in attitude I made was moving from being a
design-led front-end developer to being an engineering-led front-end devel-
oper. Just a few years ago, I used to be a hardline semantics guy. I believed
that my markup should be handcrafted and clean and perfect, and that
avoiding classes and using clever selectors was awesome, and the sure sign
of a great developer!
Then I started my job as senior UI developer at BSkyB, where I was the
only front-end developer in a company full of incredibly talented software
engineers. I’d moved from an agency-like company where other front-end
developers shared the same ideals — the yearn for lean markup and seman-
tics — and now I was in a company with no one who thought like that at
all, and I was working on sites that I would have to scale and maintain for
years to come. Being in this environment, surrounded by engineers, really
opened my eyes.