Learning by Hacking

My talk covered how to build big, scalable front-ends and one of the key factors involved in doing so is sensible and generous use of abstracted classes. One thing that really helps you achieve this is the application of the single responsibility principle, a method used mainly in OO programming.

I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.

You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.

You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways.

You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough, so whatever.

And on you go. Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools.

Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door.

That’s what’s wrong with PHP.

We’re in a really exciting time for front-end web development. Our modern browsers are excellent in terms of their standard support for CSS, and new features are becoming usable far more rapidly than I can ever remember.

This situation is exactly what we asked for in the early days of the Web Standards movement. That browsers support standard features according to the spec, so that developers could build their site using a single browser and be confident that it would then work in the other browsers. Vendor prefixes aside (and I personally believe they are a sane solution to the problem of implementing early stage CSS) that is where we are now. I do most development in Firefox on my Linux desktop and it just works in the other modern browsers and platforms that I test in. Even something that might be considered complex – such as a large-scale responsive design – works pretty consistently across not only desktop browsers but mobile ones too.

However, despite us entering a seemingly golden age of browser consistency, what I am seeing is an increasing reliance on a whole slew of polyfills, CSS frameworks and boilerplate starting points. I am concerned that these things are being promoted as something everyone should include from the outset, rather than being a toolkit you draw on to deal with problems once they have arisen.