WDRL 217

Easy Hard Web Development, Branding Details and Unidirectional Data Flows with Server-Sent Events

Hi, I’m Anselm Hannemann. Freelance webdesigner, frontend engineer, advisor. Curating WDRL, growing vegetables on a market garden farm.

Profile photo of the author, Anselm Hannemann

Hey,

Every profession is a wide field where many people find their very own, custom niches. So is design and web development today. I started building my first website with framesets and HTML4.0, images and a super limited set of CSS, and oh fancy, gifs and inline JavaScript (remember the onclick="" attribute?) about one and a half decades ago and learned the initial, absolutely necessary skills for that in four days.

But times are very different today, and when I see how capable the web has become, it’s reasonable to say that it can give people a hard time to start out in this field, and it can be reasonable for people to say that they want to focus on one specific part of web development only. Nowadays we have JavaScript developers who don’t know much HTML or CSS and we have developers who aren’t able to work on a modern JavaScript stack but are heroes in what they achieve with CSS. There are people specialising in Webfont loading, in web performance, in security, in privacy, or in usability.

Web development has grown up to be a solid profession—something that needs a vast amount of knowledge to be an expert in it, something that cannot be learned anymore in a few days. Instead, we’re now able to build applications in the web and do things I could never imagine the web to be capable of 16 years ago. If we look at how much effort it is to get into woodworking, for example, we realize that web development isn’t much different. Of course one can achieve some result in a few hours but producing something that lasts, is solid and looks great requires a lot of knowledge, experience, failures and patience. So does building a great web experience.

News

Generic

UI/UX

Accessibility

JavaScript

Work & Life

Go beyond…

Anselm