Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS
David Heinemeier Hansson has written an interesting post about the current state of web design and how designers ought to be able to still work on the code side of things:
We build using server-side rendering, Turbolinks, and Stimulus. All tools that are approachable and realistic for designers to adopt, since the major focus is just on HTML and CSS, with a few sprinkles of JavaScript for interactivity.
And it’s not like it’s some well kept secret! In fact, every single framework we’ve created at Basecamp that allows designers to work this way has been open sourced. The calamity of complexity that the current industry direction on JavaScript is unleashing upon designers is of human choice and design. It’s possible to make different choices and arrive at different designs.
I like this sentiment a whole lot — not every company needs to build their websites the same way. However, I don’t think that the approach that Basecamp has taken would scale to the size of a much larger organization. David continues:
Also not interested in retreating into the idea that you need a whole team of narrow specialists to make anything work. That “full-stack” is somehow a point of derision rather than self-sufficiency. That designers are so overburdened with conceptual demands on their creativity that they shouldn’t be bordered or encouraged to learn how to express those in the native materials of the web. Nope. No thanks!
Designing for the modern web in a way that pleases users with great, fast designs needn’t be this maze of impenetrable complexity. We’re making it that! It’s possible not to.
Again, I totally agree with David’s sentiment as I don’t think there’s anyone in the field who really wants to make the tools we use to build websites overly complicated; but in this instance, I tend to agree with what Nicolas recently had to say on this matter:
You don’t like lots of minified class names in Twitter’s markup. I don’t like apps that only support English and Western desktop hardware. You don’t like losing control over hand-made CSS files. I don’t like shipping 600KB of CSS every time a big app is deployed.
— Nicolas (@necolas) January 26, 2019
The interesting thing to note here is that the act of front-end development changes based on the size and scale of the organization. As with all arguments in front-end development, there is no “right” way! Our work has to adapt to the problems that we’re trying to solve. Is a large, complex React front-end useful for Basecamp? Maybe not. But for some organizations, like mine at Gusto, we have to specialize in certain areas because the product that we’re working on is so complicated.
I guess what I also might be rambling about is that I don’t think it’s engineers that are making front-end development complicated — perhaps it’s the expectations of our users.
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