Tinned Fruit Missives February 2019

With the northern hemisphere’s web developers cooped up inside because of the cold, what better time of year to stoke the fires with a good old-fashioned front-end ~~flame war~~ debate?

Yes, January saw another round of robust discussion of the relative merits of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, resulting quickly in an existential crisis.

I’m not going to labour the points made by others here. My reaction could be summarised by a deep breath and a long, weary sigh. I’ll let you make your own judgement as to what that means.

Have a great month!

– Jim

January’s front-end existential crisis:

The Great Divide - Chris Coyier

“Two front end developers are sitting at a bar. They have nothing to talk about.”

HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points - Rachel Andrew

The way that new front-end developers are learning how to build for the web has changed. Rachel Andrew examines the impact this is having on our industry and the way we use and discuss web technology.

Openness and Longevity - Garrett Dimon

Garrett makes the case for using the web platform and continuing to make a long bet on its fundamentals.

HTML is and always was a compilation target – can we deal with that? - Christian Heilmann

Christian argues we can get too puritanically artisanal about using web fundamentals. After all, most HTML is not hand-written, but compiled.

Some other World Wide Web hyperlinks I have enjoyed this month

Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder - Charity Majors

The Ethics of Web Performance - Tim Kadlec

Big Win for Web Accessibility in Domino’s Pizza Case - Lainey Feingold

Defining value: the most ambiguous word in product development - Jeff Gothelf

The Front-End Performance Checklist 2019 - Vitaly Friedman

Who is @horse_js? - Jasmine Greenaway & Burke Holland

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Tinned Fruit Missives is a monthly newsletter about web product development and front-end practices published by Jim Newbery, an independent coach and consultant from Edinburgh in Scotland.