Joe's
Digital Garden

Front-End Web Development

Collection of notes as I work through the MDN Web Docs and collect fragments of new APIs or elements that I simply forgot even existed.

Naval Gazing About Front-End

Jared Gorski in Practical Front End Philosophy outlines several interesting observations about the field:

  1. Back-end development's interfaces are computer orientated, whereas Front-end is defined by it's focus on human-oriented interfaces.
  2. Because of this, the Front-end must handle a "giant data transform" from scalar values to visual presentation.
  3. There is an infinte number of subjective presentations this transform can become.
  4. Therefore it is often difficult to isolate development patterns and anti-patterns in Front-end development; and what patterns do emerge tend to be esoteric rather than applicable to fundamental principles of computing.

It is the last two points that makes Front End development both immensly satisfying (the quality of the work is predicated on your aesthetic taste) but also immensly frusterating (what knowledge we gain in the area is frequently a mere trend).

External References

  1. MDN Web Docs. Moz://a. Retrieved 2021-05-26.
  2. Gorski, Jared. Practical Front End Philosophy. Retrieved 2021-10-09.

Linked References