CHAPTER 1 Modern CSS Architecture and Front-End Development
54,000 people^4 , and even the company I work for — Sky Bet — making over
a hundred million pounds a year^5 and employing 450 people solely from
money made online, it would be naive to think we can treat websites today
as we did ten or even five years ago. However, a lot of us still do.
With websites getting bigger, their dev teams growing larger, and their
goals becoming more tightly defined and, I dare say, more important, we
need to take another look at how we actually build them. It’s no longer
practical to hand-craft code, and pursue semantic purity and clean markup;
a much more rapid, powerful and pragmatic approach is needed. We need
to change again.
The books, articles and blog posts written on Web standards over the
last decade or so all contained relevant, sound advice — there is no denying
that — but the Web has changed at a much faster rate than our best practic-
es have. We’ve outgrown the methods of years gone by and it’s now up to
us to update the unwritten rules of Web development to fit the new land-
scape. Bigger, app-like sites that serve millions of users a day and generate
billions of dollars of income require an approach that early-2000s advice
simply cannot offer us. We need to embrace another change in attitude,
one that takes into account the different nature of the Web today, and also
that of the people involved in it: your stakeholders.Note: Nicolas Gallagher recently gave a great talk at W3Conf about “Ques-
tioning Best Practices”^6. It is well worth a watch.The Three Stakeholders
By and large, with any Web project, there are three main stakeholders, the
three groups of people to whom the site matters the most. This is, of course,
a massive generalization, but I find that, for the most part, it holds true:4 http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html
5 http://smashed.by/skybet
6 http://smashed.by/best-pract