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Comment by port11 | Hacker News Reader

The major issue with this is that modern CSS is almost its own job, to the point we used to have Interface Developers at some place I’ve worked (HTML+CSS specialists). I did frontend for over a decade and eventually lost the train on CSS changes, I don’t even know what’s going on there anymore.

It’s still awesome, but it’s becoming increasingly silly to ask someone to know modern HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Typescript, some build tools, a couple of frameworks, etc.

The amount of JS we ship to clients is a reflection of cost-cutting measures at your workplace, not that every FE dev shuns CSS.

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When I started dabbling in web development, writing HTML and CSS was already its own job, and professional JavaScript developers basically did not exist. This was before TypeScript, before Node, before Ajax, before React or even jQuery. If anything has exploded in complexity in the intervening years, it's the JavaScript part of the equation.

I agree that it's increasingly silly to ask someone to be an expert in all of frontend. But the primary driver of that is not all the new CSS features we're getting.

Agreed. Having a "HTML + CSS" engineer on the team was largely due to the number of hacks needed to make css work -- purposely adding invalid html that would only be parsed by specific browsers, ie5 vs ie6 vs netscape being wildly different (opera mobile was out of this world different), using sprites everywhere because additional images would have a noticeable lag time (especially with javascript hover), clearfix divs to overcome float issues. To be clear, I'm not saying "things were harder back then" or "css is simple now", but things with CSS were so wild and the tooling was so bad, that it what a unique skill of it's own that is less needed now, and the shift has been for people to focus on going deeper with js.

<sarcasm>I'm an expert -> just write everything in static html, use css only where defaults are neglected. After relevant tables in the db are updated generate a new static document. Only if that won't fly use json but feel appropriately dirty when you do.

These are fair points. And developers themselves thought “hey, what if I also write Node?”, thus making things worse. Businesses accepted that all too willingly.

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