Rock ‘n’ roll monkey Kung Fu
It’s my last full week at Graphico before stepping off the edge and going solo with the new company. I have one outstanding project to finish-up, Geek night at Oxford on Wednesday and some bags to pack for a trip to Italy. We open the doors to Standard Ease on Monday 21 July. From my time at Oxford Brookes to the present I have seen a lot happen in Front-end web development.
When I first started at Graphico the idea of a dedicated Front-end developer was still something of a novelty. Most front-end work was done by Back-end Developers making the best of a sometimes difficult situation. I remember being advised on one occasion that the only way to achieve certain visual effects was to “put it in a table“. This went on to become something of a standing joke amongst the developers.
Things have moved on a lot, but it’s a struggle at times to get minds on-board with semantic development . I am happy to say that standards based development is now the norm at Graphico and there’s a roster of 3 Front-end Developers. Some people call them Front-end Engineers, User Interface Designers or accessibility gurus. The truth is they’re just plain semantic developers who like neat code, natty design and platform independence.
Over the last few years I have seen an increase in the number of technically-aware Visual Designers. In companies where visual design and front-end development are separated there can be an “us and them” mentality. It can be seen most virulently in the 37 Signals article “Why we skip Photoshop” which rippled out across the internet with both sides regarding the other as either Code monkey or Photoshop monkey. I have seen however that Front-end Developers and Visual Designers are much closer now than ever and share an increasingly common vocabulary of design patterns. I see myself as a Hybrid monkey which will become a more common role with increased adoption of design techniques culled from Rich Internet Applications. The winners here will be the people who can do both design and code.
I have watched front-end become the rock ‘n’ roll discipline of web development filled with bloggers, authors, innovators, self-promoters and conference junkies. I have watched the steady evolution of language derived form Dave Shea’s notion of the Zen Garden to include anything Kung Fu, Dao or of eastern religion. I have seen of pioneers of the blogosphere withdraw from public writing after very public rows. I have watched corporations u-turn following hostile opinion voiced through that same blogosphere. It’s all been very rock ‘n’ roll indeed.
By 2009 we will have new WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and increased awareness of Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 124 which frames accessibility in a commerce-digestible notion of Risk Management. Front-end is growing up and it’s impossible to see a job advertised anywhere in the world that doesn’t mention Web Standards, accessibility or best-practice. It has become a role in its own right and I couldn’t be happier.
Tags: Dave Shea, design patterns, Front-end development, Graphico, Internet Applications, Italy, Oxford, Standard Ease, Visual design, web development, Web Standards, Zen Garden
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:28 am
What are you views on the following article?
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tohellwithwcag2
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:11 am
Hi Gav,
Joe Clark wrote this quite a while back and I must admit I never really saw the problem with WCAG 2. When I first read it it made lot of sense to me. Maybe because as a developer in the field, I already had strong context and understood that the underlying principles in WCAG 2 were similar to its predecessor. It’s still about aiming high and doing what we can to be inclusive.
WCAG 1 had ambiguity issues especially at the higher level and there will be ambiguity issues with WCAG 2. But communities tend to find common solutions and new conventions will evolve.
Individual opinions about the inadequacies of guidelines shouldn’t detract from t he fact that it’s a common foundation to build upon. I wonder if Joe has had a change of heart since 2006 when the article was written?
WCAG 2 going to happen so let’s agree to do our best with what we have.