i am sure he, like i, am a big fan of the separation of concerns that is finally taking place in that regard

no longer is a web developer expected to do glorified text editing

in fairness, doing modern CSS and html5 correctly is hardly glorified text editing. there really is a lot to know, there are libraries to learn, etc. it's strikes me that to be a good modern frontend person, you need to have a high level of tolerance for anal retentive detail. it's sort of like being a fact checker or grammar maven. which ofc explains the disdain and dismissal. but i think it's unfair to call them glorified text editors.

If you guys had only minor programming background experience (basically 2 college level courses in C++ years ago), and no real need for money nor time constraints, which language would you learn if you wanted to:

1) work at a start up
or
2) do free lance stuff from home

I just started playing with ruby on rails (mostly because 2 of my close friends develop with it) and am wondering if I should be dedicating my time elsewhere.

Ruby or Python.

ruby on rails is a perfect technology to learn.

i think python is a great language for beginners but if you really care about what's hot in the job market (you almost certainly shouldn't, but that's not what you asked about), i see waaaaaay more job ads about ruby and rails than i do about python (and django/pylons/whatever pale imitation of rails for python is hot today).

re: the frontend thing: "web developers" get a bad rap in the same way that "system administrators" do -- the ones that are good are worth their weight in gold, but most people who subscribe to either label are worthless and call themselves Web Developer or System Administrator because that's what it said on the cover of their "make millions of dollars as an X in 24 hours!!!1" book.

Is it crazy to expect a developer to tell what conditions need to be met for a window to display instead of trying to manually find the conditions by ****ing around with the inputs and hand checking the rest calls?

that depends... is he a frontend developer??

(sorry, i couldn't resist that one.)

i can imagine some scenarios where exploration is the only way to answer such a question, but it implies some pretty nasty things about the underlying architecture.

Ya, I'm just tired and cranky and failed to avoid bitching about work. 26 days and I'm back in the states...

well when you make it back to WA i'll buy you a gyro and/or a beer.

It may be a bit, I had to cancel my stop over in Seattle so I could be around the office for that weekend just in case... ****ers.

we should get together and lol @ front end developers

It may be popular to lol at frontend work but it's only going to get more important from here on out as more and more webapps move code to the client side. I bet javascript is going to be the most employable language soon.

when it happens, the real developers will be summoned from the backend to clean up all the one-off, unmaintainable code created by frontend developers. frontend developers can then go back to pushing pixels around and arguing about look-and-feel, just as god intended.

also javascript is already becoming popular for a variety of applications, including the backend. see e.g. node.js.

i'm in!

i think this is true, although calling javascript when used in full fledged dynamic apps (stuff like gmail, etc) "frontend work" is a bit of a misnomer imo. because now you are talking about legitimate business logic (often interacting with a DB via ajax) that just happens to be written in js.

Maybe I was misinterpreting "frontend" then. I always just considered html/css to be "web design" and not "frontend work". Looks like I am mistaken though.

Once you pass a certain point of complexity if you put an ad out for someone who can do Javascript you'll be shooting yourself in the foot because you need people who are amazing designers as well as JS coders or you'll end up with the biggest plate of spaghetti the world has ever seen

Edit: Also idk really what frontend means but I always assumed it was anything that the end user can see basically (images, layout, html, css etc)

unicorn imo

neko,

i'm just ****ing around (...mostly ). truthfully, i think that excessive siloing between frontend/backend, dev/test/ops, product management/development, etc. is one of the most common and destructive anti-patterns in the software industry. ultimately, when the product is broken and the customers are unhappy, that affects all of us equally no matter our individual specialties.

Agreed. I have *a lot* of respect for talented designers, even more so if they have the chops to turn their design into html/css and get it rendering correctly in a browser. Although, IMO turning a design into html/css possibly lies outside the scope of what a designer should be doing. It's usually pretty easy for a developer to take a mocked up website (in PS or whatever) and turn it into html/css.

I've had a couple successful projects where I partnered with a designer who literally did not know what html was. She sent me images of her design and I translated it to html/css/js and the sites came out looking great and the clients were very pleased with the results.

eta: bottom line is I just think it's stupid to rag on designers when most of us couldn't design our way out of a wet paper bag.

i was using "frontend" to mean taking design and producing the html/css to realize it. if you classify that as web design, i'm not really sure what you're left with for frontend.

i think js can become a gray area, but for true js applications, your library will still generally have some way to separate application and model logic from view logic. eg, the MVVM that knockout.js uses....

So today for "no particular reason" I find myself wondering how many websites based entirely on typing things in forms where one can lose all progress by accidentally hitting "Back" have to exist before web browser designers decide that I should be able to disable "Backspace" as a keyboard shortcut for "Back".

EDIT: And google to the rescue: http://superuser.com/questions/62160...ity-in-firefox . I had actually installed an extension in the past but updates broke it...

that was one of the first things i had to change when i moved from mozilla to firefox.

(it's been so long since "mozilla" designated a browser that i had to google it and make sure i hadn't completely lost my mind.)

I just don't get it. The first web browser I've ever used regularly was Netscape 3, and yet the ratio of times I've wanted to put my fist through my monitor because of the forum post/email/assignment I just lost to the times I've wanted a "Back" keyboard shortcut that was only one key is...well, there isn't one because the second never happened. It's not just that it's a one-key shortcut, it's that it's a one-key shortcut to a destructive behavior that also allows me to accidentally confirm because by the time I've noticed a mistake I've probably hit a few more keys because I'm typing. I'm sure there's some historical reason they used that particular key, especially since every browser I know of does or has done it at some point but since I don't that reason it just strikes me as inexplicably moronic. Why not bind the space bar to Reload and "Q" to "close all my tabs without warning" while we're at it?

It's been a pretty long time since I had to rewrite urls with apache, can someone help me with this pretty simple task.

Situation:
I have an index php page that loads a specific page depending on a query string (in this example, the QS is "m=foo" where foo = the page I want to load.

So, to begin I added this rule:
Rewrites to /foo

Next up, one of the pages has a blog so I need a few more variables:
Rewrites to /blog/someCategoryOrBlogTitle

And support for pagination:
Rewrites to /blog/page-1 , etc.

And support for pagination if you have category filtering on:
Rewrites to /blog/someCategory/page-1 , etc.

The end result in the htaccess file:

Cool, everything works but I also have a photo page in addition to the blog.

I want to be able to goto /photos/galleryName instead of index.php?m=photos&v=galleryName but when I add this 2 things happen.

1. The photo gallery works but the blog does not (it redirects to the photo gallery).
2. The blog works but the photo gallery does not (it redirects to the blog).

#1 or #2 happens depending on the order I add the line in the htaccess file.

I've tried:
And:
Also tried using a different query string name instead of "v" for the photos but it's still broken.

Little help?

I also tried putting in QSA flags in nearly everyone as random guesses but no luck. I must be doing something ******ed but I don't know what.