Steph Notes#
I'm a web developer largely because I love the instant gratification of writing words and making a thing happen which is why I imagine my following quote from the show to be largely true:
...what I think we can agree on as builders of the web is that if nothing else - we all love to tinker, right?
And the ability for anyone to begin tinkering on the web has seemed to simultaneously strengthen and weaken in recent years. The ways that it has become easier - like "improved" WYSIWYG editors or more fully designed CSS and JavaScript frameworks - seem to also encourage bad practices and accessibility violations. But those fundamental languages - and in particularly their individual ecosystems - have strengthened. But lest we not forget, with great power comes great responsibility...
With that in mind, it was important to me to also highlight that your pathway into the web and the context in which you work on web technologies strongly shapes the lens with which you view the web.
I know it's a lot (too much) to ask for everyone on the web to remain respectful 😅, but I hope that we can move toward education being a stronger response than ridicule when someone has a misguided opinion about web fundamentals and technologies (abusive behavior being the exception, that should definitely be called out and shut down).
Keep in mind newbies are watching and what kind of feeling do we want them to walk away with - encouraged or discouraged?
Claire Notes#
Honestly, I could go on and on about how the Web is probably one of the best "systems" we have. It's (ideally) decentralized, attempts to be democratic, and isn't (hopefully) dictated by one company. Sure, companies have had larger shares of influence over the years (looking at you, Microsoft and Google), but for the most part - the web has remained in the people's hands. There are a lot of things that are wrong with the web, such as how the web is constantly broken by new and shiny JavaScript frameworks, etc. But the main dream is still very much alive:
- HTML (inherently accessible when used properly)
- CSS (don't forget your color contrast and not hiding content in pseudo-elements!)
- a sprinkle of JS (your site should work if JS is not enabled, or JS things should have an equivalent non-JS way of being used)
Also, I got my JS history wrong in the podcast. JScript was Microsoft's "dialect" of ECMAScript, and is still very much alive via .NET. Chakra was the name of the scripting engine for IE 9-11 (and now lives on as an open source project)
The reason this is so important to me is that I've had to unlearn a lot by learning bad practices from the start. If we teach new developer friends to learn the basics, the fundamentals, the best practices now, they'll be set up to better themselves and the rest of the community.