Overlapping skills in front-end development

Last week a poll about CSS did the rounds with a question about the cascade. It got me thinking about CSS and overlapping skills in front-end development.

Is the cascade more complex than other concepts?

The question was, given two class selectors applied to two elements which had the order of classes as their only difference, what they would look like. Many respondents got it wrong. CSS nerds replied that the question was fairly basic, JS nerds replied CSS is shit. Ok, that was likely a troll. There were also sentiments like ‘you don’t get web development if you don’t understand the cascade’ or ‘you don’t get web development if you do like doing CSS’. Oh oh, social media… why am I on it?

Before continuing, I do want to defend CSS. It is a pretty smart and well-considered language. It is not a programming language by design. Concepts like the cascade are complex, but they aid the simplicity of the language, which was an important design principle.

Admittedly, it takes time to grasp such concepts before you can take full advantage of them. But isn’t that the case for most concepts in web development? Component lifecycle hooks, accessibility trees, dockerisation, OIDC, Lambda functions, writing mode agnostic (logical) properties, Content-Security Policies, DNS entries, git rebase… they all make complex-to-understand things available in simple-to-use ways. About many of these, I was frustated at first, but happy and excited ever after.

CSS may (seem to) miss some of the determinism, scoping and typing that many programmming languages offer, but I believe it is precisely the lack of those sorts of things that makes it extremely accessible to learn and use. It is by design that you can’t know what you HTML will look like. And we’re able to use JavaScript to add such features ourselves, if our codebase or team is of a size that requires them.

Overlapping skills

As people who make websites, we all specialise in different things. They often overlap. Some of us are markup nerds, server side rendering nerds, svg nerds, sysadmin nerds, security nerds, network nerds, Grid Layout nerds, webfonts nerds… most are a combination of many of these things. Some of us aren’t even nerds. It’s all good. In my view, it is unlikely any person overlaps with all the things, although there are people who get dangerously close.

If I learned anything from reading the comments, besides ‘don’t read the comments’, it is this: I need to remind myself that we can all learn so much from each other, because skills overlap. That requires not a ‘X is shit’ attitude, but a ‘how does X work?’ one.