Front-end development is not a problem to be solved

Today we published something over on CSS-Tricks that I’ve been thinking about over the past year or so. A lot of folks tend to think that front-end development is a problem to be solved with tools, processes, or frameworks. And I disagree:

I reckon HTML and CSS deserve better than to be processed, compiled, and spat out into the browser, whether that’s through some build process, app export, or gigantic framework library of stuff that we half understand. HTML and CSS are two languages that deserve our care and attention to detail. Writing them is a skill.

We all want accessible interfaces where every browser can access our work, with beautiful mobile interactions, instantaneous performance, and a design system where someone can click-clack components together in no time. But all of those things are only possible if we care about the field of front-end development and see it as a worthy career.

Unlike traditional programming languages, it seems to me that many folks in web development don’t want to learn how CSS or HTML works because they feel like it will soon go away. And in this post I finally managed to put it into words although I’ve been trying to again and again over the last year.

Also, the comments that folks have added to this piece are super interesting.