What Iāve Hated and What Iāve Loved About Web Development
Published on September 30, 2015 (ā» February 5, 2024), filed under Web Development (RSS feed for allĀ categories).
This post is partially outdated.
In On Web Development and in other contexts Iāve alluded to wrapping up, ending my old career. Thatās only correct to an extent.
Whatās correct is that my focus is temporarily was on philosophy and politics now. Whatās incorrect about my current status is that Iāll keep working on a number of tech projects, will keep contributing to a couple of lists and standards, and will listen to exciting projects that seek my experience and ideas.
Even though I wonāt announce my industry retirement just yet, here are some observations from 16 years in web development, almost from the Webās infancy, to today. I figured I better get a few notes down to paperāif Iām tinkering around for another 16 years I can amend the lists later. Maybe you find some things in here youāve hated or loved about our field, too.
What Iāve Hated
- Table layouts.
- Counting
colspan
s androwspan
s. - Spacer GIFs.
- WYSIWYG editors (although, or because, I started with Dreamweaverāin 1999).
- Any editor thatās not vi or IntelliJ (or perhaps Sublime).
- Conditional Comments. (To me theyāre a sign of not understanding HTML.)
- Resets and normalizers. (To me theyāre a sign of not understanding CSS.)
- Variables and mixins. (They have a place but originated in using CSS in aā¦ very particular fashion.)
- Unnecessary complexity.
- No understanding of tailoring.
- No understanding of iterating.
- Feature creep.
- Sloppiness.
- Laziness.
- People who confuse apps and docs.
- People who make things too complicated.
- Software developers who think theyāre web developers.
- That everybody thinks theyāre a web designer or developer.
- That everybody thinks theyāre a good web designer or developer (perhaps including myself at times).
- A lot of pretending.
- Armchair standardistas.
- Pseudos.
- Trolls.
- A__holes.
- Poor discussion culture.
- That tendency to jump on bandwagons.
- That tendency to be different for the sake of being different.
- No halting to optimize standards, techniques, methods.
- āYou can means you should.ā
- Barely any CSS-only redesigns.
- Bloated standards.
- Dead standards.
- Badges.
- Fora.
- A List Apart (
maybe because we never got to work togetherwhich changed after we got to finally work together). - 24 Ways (both sides had too much attitude).
- MySpace (especially around 2006, when it was the epitome of poor design and code).
- Fake or promo comments (pleading guilty, too).
- Zeldmanās Designing with Web Standards. (Envy?)
- XHTML (yes).
- Ad code.
- My past code!
- Spam.
- 404s.
- Chasing 404s.
- Maintaining manually.
- Internet Explorer.
- Firefox (too slow).
- Some working groups.
- Writing and being lectured by biased reviewers.
- That not more people followed my always sound advice š¬
What Iāve Loved
- The creativity.
- The possibilities.
- The many opportunities.
- The many people who had no idea about what they were doing (often enough including myself).
- The many idealists.
- The many great people.
- The many brilliant people (particularly Ian).
- The many brilliant and difficult people (notably Joe).
- The rising stars (whether Anne back ten years ago or Harry Roberts now).
- Eric Meyer and HĆ„kon Wium Lie.
- And more.
- The many great like-minded people.
- The mind-boggling spectacle, good and bad, of lazy people becoming inventive.
- Anything goes (and reining in the ones who believe that!).
- How serious people take themselves.
- Public technical debates leading to excess, exhaustion, oblivion.
- Trolls.
- Blogs.
- Feeds.
- Moonshots.
- Automation.
- Validation!
- Quality control.
- Optional tags.
- Contributing to a still young industry and profession.
- Pro bono work.
- The idea behind XHTML 2.0.
- CSS!
- DRY.
- SOC.
- Minimal code.
- Good code!
- My present code (vision, idea). Um.
- Information design.
- Typography.
- Proofreading, editing, proofreading again and still finding errors later (thatās why).
- Designing and coding 404 pages that get millions of hits a day.
- The few interviews I gave.
- IntelliJ.
- Transmit.
- DreamHost.
- Chrome.
- Firefox when it was Phoenix.
- Google.
- The WHATWG.
- Also the W3C!
- Coding by hand.
- Maintaining manually.
- Writing frameworks.
- Writing coding guidelines.
- Writing about web development for a career.
- Writing provocatively!
- Writing and being lectured by competent editors.
- My readers, the ones who have supported me and my work, and put up with some most horrible English.
I contemplated pumping more points into this for spectacle, and refrained. As I said, Iām still in the field, and Iām sure thereāll be more things to love-hate about web development. See you around.
About Me
Iām Jens, and Iām an engineering lead and author. Iāve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, Iām close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for OāReilly and FrontendĀ Dogma.
With my current move to Spain, Iām open to a new remote frontend leadership position. Feel free to review and refer my CV or LinkedInĀ profile.
I love trying things, not only in web development, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views andĀ experiences.
Comments (Closed)
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On October 2, 2015, 13:02 CEST, Giovanni said:
Can you expand on why you hated Zeldmanās book?
This one made me laugh, but itās just so true: āSoftware developers who think theyāre web developers.ā
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On October 3, 2015, 15:39 CEST, Jens Oliver Meiert said:
Jeffreyās book was much too hyped for my taste, and I deemed it to contain too much compromise and ill advice. On the other hand, I was this young, grumpy, overzealous web developer at the time, and our field was in need of some compromise, too, to become more standards-aware. The book was probably very good for us.
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On October 4, 2015, 7:13 CEST, Francis Kim said:
Hate it or love it, Dreamweaver fixed most of the table layouts and spacer gif issues for me. I STILL use it for email templates :3
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On October 4, 2015, 16:33 CEST, Jens Oliver Meiert said:
I wouldnāt have deemed it possible that Dreamweaver was even going to be around for so long! (Still, my attitude here is not as grim as it used to be.)
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On October 5, 2015, 22:00 CEST, P.R. Deltoid said:
You put Joe Clark of all people in your loved column?? Are you off your meds? I would think that vicious man belongs in all the categories pseudo, troll, and [a__hole] if anyone did.
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