Web Ethics

The topic for March’s edition of #startYourShift is web ethics.

When most people think of web ethics, they probably think of design. Using one site for inspiration to build our own design…clearly fine. Copying a button style is probably fine. Copying an entire design obviously isn’t.

But as a front end developer, there’s certainly web ethics at play as well. Front end is a unique place on the web because anybody can look at my code without too much work. When it comes to design, you’re not going to click view source and suddenly get the original design comps. The same is also true of the back end. But not only can I look at the front end code for any site on the internet, there are tools built into all browsers to aid me in that endeavor.

So what are my front end ethics?

If somebody publishes something open source, I feel comfortable using it. If somebody answers a question on Stack Overflow, that’s being written for others and I feel I can use their solution. Many developers write blog posts walking through how they built something cool. (Shameless plug: I wrote something for my company’s blog last week doing just that.) The same is true of developers who publish code snippets to sites like Codepen.io. (Shameless plug #2: I do that too!)

I always try to leave a comment in my code when I use something from any of the above because a) it’s a good reference for later and b) always best to leave credit!

Where I feel things are getting shady is if you’re combing through another site in Chrome dev tools to copy their code for your own site. That’s not to say I find something wrong with looking at another site in dev tools. I’m sure I’m not the only front end developer whose first reaction when they see something cool is to see how it was built. But there’s a big difference between doing that and actually taking code for use somewhere else.

Basically that’s how I try to look at web ethics from a front end development perspective. If somebody is putting their code out there for others to learn, that’s one thing. If I’m actively digging to find code, that’s something totally different.