A Vision of Web Development

Published on May 13, 2015 (↻ October 3, 2023), filed under Development (RSS feed for all categories).

There is one thing every web developer should aspire to: writing the most minimal, semantically appropriate, valid HTML, and then never changing it. “Never” not in a sense of denial and refusal, for structural changes can always require modifications, but in the sense of a guiding light. The idea of minimal, semantically appropriate, valid markup tickles the most out of us as web developers. It leads us not only to supreme markup quality but pushes us to acquire and exhibit bigger powers in our style sheets and scripts.

The vision is one of highest efficiency, to handle presentational changes only through CSS updates and behavioral ones only through JavaScript updates. Writing HTML, design-agnostic as it should be, has always been underestimated; it’s the hardest to write well.

As briefly as I could put it—in The Little Book of HTML/CSS Frameworks!

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m a contributor to several web standards, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (Be critical, interpret charitably, and give feedback.)