I’m a sucker for something about front-end job titles.
CSS developed and we’re past the purpose the place everybody can simply do it as a facet curiosity. All of us can be taught it and construct wonderful stuff with it, however utilizing it properly and accurately in a large-scale context isn’t a simple job anymore. It deserves individuals whose work is to deal with that a part of the code.
Anselm is partly in responding to Sacha Greif’s “Is There Too A lot CSS Now?” and the general sentiment that CSS has a a lot larger barrier to entry for these studying it at this time than it did, say, within the CSS3 days. Again then, there was a brilliant direct path to see the magic of CSS. Rachel Andrew completely captures that magic feeling in a prescient put up from 2019:
There’s something outstanding about the truth that, with all the things we now have created prior to now 20 years or so, I can nonetheless take an entire newbie and train them to construct a easy webpage with HTML and CSS, in a day. […] We simply want a textual content editor and some hours. That is how we make issues present up on a webpage.
That’s the actual entry level right here […]
Rachel is talking to the abstraction of frameworks on prime of vanilla CSS (and HTML) however you may as properly tack huge, shiny, and pretty new options on there, like CSS grid, flexbox, container queries, cascade layers, customized properties, and relational pseudo-classes, to call a couple of. Not that these are abstractions, after all. There’s only a lot to be taught proper now, whether or not you’ve been writing CSS for 20 days or 20 years.
However again to Anselm’s put up. Do we’d like to consider CSS as extra than simply, you already know, styling issues? I typically joke that my job is slapping paint on web sites to make them fairly. However, actually, I do know it’s much more than that. Everyone knows it’s greater than that.
Possibly CSS is an business in itself. Consider all of the doable issues that must go by your mind when writing CSS guidelines. Heck, Ahmad Shadeed just lately shared all of the issues his mind processes simply to model a Hero element. CSS touches a lot of the general consumer expertise — responsiveness, accessibility, efficiency, cross-browser, and many others. — that it clearly goes properly past “slapping paint on web sites”. To this point past that every of these issues could possibly be somebody’s full-time gig, relying on the venture.
So, sure, CSS has reached some extent the place I may think about seeing “CSS Engineer” on some job board. As Anselm stated, “[CSS] deserves individuals whose work is to deal with that a part of the code.” Seen that means, it’s not so arduous to think about front-end improvement as a complete evolving into areas of specialization, identical to many different industries.
