Do you really know HTML?
A lot of times I heard from people (that are not actually into web development) that they know HTML and CSS because it is “easy” and the only obstacle between web developer job and their current job (usually completely not related with development) is JavaScript.
This is kind of a funny attitude and I was inspired to think about it deeper.
I’m into web development more than 11 years and I worked on over a thousands of projects. Writing HTML and CSS are my everyday tasks and after all those times I don’t share opinion with people I mentioned in the first paragraph. HTML and CSS are not easy!
Well I guess, it depends on how you look at it. If you count “I know few HTML tags, enough to put image and text below with some inline style (text color, maybe font weight)” it is quite easy. But if you try to convert any complex design into HTML, you will find yourself in trouble. Not to mention responsive, cross browser issues, issues on mobile devices, etc.
Wait, we didn’t mention other things: component based UI, organization, naming convention, performances, commenting the code, maintenance, work with team on same code, etc.
What most of people from the first paragraph don’t realize is that being able to learn and use few HTML tags and some CSS is not being able to work as a front-end developer. In order to perform front-end dev job you really need to know a lot of different things, often not related to FE itself. I mean, you will agree that every FE needs to know about GIT, FTP, SSH, MySQL, PHP, SEO, Ajax, domains, DNS, basic server configuration, etc. especially if you work alone and don’t have dedicated team to perform mentioned tasks for you.
Let’s back to HTML itself. It’s API is huge and there are tons of things that constantly evolve and change. Beside that, there are a lot of things that are not commonly used so even experienced developers are not familiar with them. Even more, knowing HTML means that you know and understand differences in implementation on different browsers and how to bypass it.
I’d say that knowing HTML and CSS is (same as many other things) a much wider and broader topic and it takes a lot of knowledge and experience. Same as any thing in life, learning is discovering how much you still have to learn, and being at the beginning is the only time you are convinced that you know a lot.
