Frameworks, and coding, and CSS...oh my!

Sometimes I despair of the modern coding scene. Android, and Chrome and mobile and Jquery have emerged, and it does appear to do something very strange to some programmers: specifically they don’t know how to program.

I had a slightly odd CSS query but I knew there were ways round it in 2004 when I last used CSS in anger, so I had a look around the forums and the talks to see if anything had changed.

“Oh no, you’ll have to use jQuery and customise x function” External dependency and several hundred lines of code?

“How about wordpress? Bootstrap can do it if you…” Framework, with extra holes, potential vulnerabilities, external dependancy and bloat from unneccessary functions.

“It’s not possible.”

“Generate the entire page with javascript!” No, that’s not happening. Because I’m not a moron.

“Static layer to hit before that acquire details and then…” sigh. Load my page three times?

So I went back to my old-school, rather rusty, ten-year-old CSS

Three lines.

Three lines of basic CSS in the header (OK, stylesheet)

And what’s even better, when I put them into google to see why no one covered them anymore, those three lines are covered by W3C schools.

This is entry level stuff guys, used admittedly in a non-standard and browser-compatible way, so why isn’t it used more often?

Because it needs to be coded.

And that is sad.

It’s been many years since the interview where a coder shot himself down in flames by sitting in a major finance house, failed to answer any of the coding questions and announced he didn’t need to because – holds up CD – he had all the tools he needed right here.

The interview ended right there. An unknown disc loading unknown programs into a highly secure environment and he didn’t think it would be a problem. He couldn’t even imagine how we were working if we didn’t already have these tools loaded, because no one built code from scratch…

At the time we all thought he was an outlier. Now, sadly, I suspect he is becoming the norm, and that is going to cause real problems with coding. If no one ever examines the frameworks they are building on, if they never check the foundations of their work, there could be some very nasty surprises coming up. And yes, I know I’m using wordpress for this blog. I am aware of the risks, and my serious sites either manage them, or don’t use it. However, I suspect that many of the coders above do, and they aren’t even aware that there are risks. And that worries me. Because if you aren’t even aware of the risks, how do you protect yourself?

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This blog has now moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial, where the original article can be found.  Frameworks, and coding, and CSS...oh my! - http://rablogs.co.uk/tirial/2015/03/16/frameworks-and-coding-and-css-oh-my/ was published on March 16, 2015 at 10:01 am.