February 14, 2024 at 4:40:05 PM UTC

	Since	posts	replies	likes	reposts and quotes	views
Bluesky	May 2023	1,039	8,236	23,127	2,380
Mastodon	Nov 2022	2,399	29,156	55,396	16,820
GitHub	Jul 2010	179	5,777 3,520	33,866	3,317
npm	Jul 2014	139	1,546			75,991,720
YouTube	Dec 2015	30		1,203		32,713
Letterboxd	Mar 2026	55
Blog	Nov 2025	20
Hacker News	Jan 2011	59	575	802
All	Jul 2010	4,807	37,967	114,394	22,517	76,024,433

A front-end web developer just starting out—in order to feel most aligned with the industry and apply for the best jobs—will most likely start in a tool-chain that is *not* aligned with web standards.

In some cases these tools are actively hostile to web standards.

How do we begin to dig ourselves out of this mess?

55 replies

Murtuzaali Surti ✨ 2 min later

@zachleat by not limiting ourselves to just those tools!
1. Zach Leatherman 16 min later
  
  @murtuzaalisurti yes!!
Dave Glick 3 min later

@zachleat As long as industry (and thus employment prospects) are tied to legacy/poor tooling, new developers have no choice - paying the bills is A Thing. So I think the real question is how to redirect and shift industry to the best tooling that supports web standards. If only I had an answer to that particular question though.
Sara Joy 7 min later

@zachleat I'm staying sane by pushing accessibility at work. Thankfully leadership are into it.
1. Zach Leatherman 15 min later
  
  @sarajw hell yeah.
  1. Sara Joy 45 min later
    
    @zachleat yeah I'm so lucky they are tbh, or I would be highly disillusioned by now! I totally get the burnout that people who respect the web platform and care about everyone's access end up with.
2. Jared White (ResistanceNet ✊) 1 hr later
  
  @sarajw @zachleat That's great to hear. I'm thankful that the one project I'm on where we do use React, there's still a lot of focus on semantic HTML/CSS and accessibility. I don't think I could handle it there if that weren't the case!
  1. Sara Joy 1 hr later
    
    @jaredwhite @zachleat that's good to hear too :)
Matt Stein 8 min later

@zachleat By making personal projects for fun and with heart, not overcomplicating them, and sharing the contagious joy of craft as an alternative to slick complexity.*
* But I’m just making that up.
1. Zach Leatherman 15 min later
  
  @mattrambles cheering along to this! yes!
2. Sara Joy 23 min later
  
  @mattrambles @zachleat that's the other thing I'm doing to stay sane.
  But several of my coworkers are so deep in React thinking, I don't get it. Makes it easier for them to understand it of course...
  1. Matt Stein 33 min later
    
    @sarajw I’m eternally waffling between things, and I get the allure of UI frameworks and (deep breath) Tailwind. I enjoy them! I also lose touch with something going all in on them and I’m trying to make sense of it before I exit to a non-development livelihood. This is mostly what I’m writing about through February.
    @zachleat
    1. Zach Leatherman 6 days later
      
      @mattrambles @sarajw looking forward to it!
      1. Matt Stein 6 days later
        
        @zachleat It’s been a daily challenge on my quiet weird blog. I got into dependencies today.
        https://garden.mattstein.com/notes/people-content-20-dependencies
        @sarajw
Adam Stoddard 15 min later

@zachleat I think about this a lot both with development work and designing for the web. The question on my mind is if there's even a place where someone *could* learn a modern, platform-centric approach in a holistic way?
1. Zach Leatherman 17 min later
  
  @aaadaaam whew, I’m struggling to think of a beginner-friendly comprehensive resource.
  Both web.dev and developer.mozilla.org are trying to be this, I think!
  1. Sara Joy 47 min later
    
    @zachleat @aaadaaam freecodecamp is pretty good, guiding people along the native platform.
    1. Adam Stoddard 1 hr later
      
      @sarajw @zachleat these are all better answers than what I've had!
      I think the thing I'm getting at is that React has super polished, outcome focused (here's what you need to know to get a job / build things people will pay for) courseware like https://react.gg and the platform-centric approach doesn't. If employers want React *and* React has an easier on-ramp then new folks are going to pick it.
      (I feel like I'm convincing myself to make courseware oh no)
Micah 18 min later

@zachleat Interestingly, having just heard from @castastrophe about Adobe's focus on web components and design systems, it seems like we need high profile companies like Adobe to lead the way demonstrating that the native web is the future.
I don't know if it'll take a Responsive Web Design > Boston Globe moment for developers and companies to take a 2nd look, but the market needs to be shook up and presented practical examples of a better way!
1. Zach Leatherman 6 days later
  
  @asuh @castastrophe Now is the time! Keep celebrating those success stories! I’d love to see more case studies linked up from something like https://arewebcomponentsathingyet.com/
McNeely 18 min later

@zachleat We need toolchains that treat packages and package managers as optional enhancements rather than necessary ingredients.
1. Zach Leatherman 48 min later
  
  @McNeely _YES_ 100000%
  1. McNeely 1 hr later
    
    @zachleat this has been a blog post in the back of my mind for a few months now. Maybe I'll sit down and write it for real...
2. Private reply 2 hr later
Eric Eggert 23 min later

@zachleat This fucks up so much of accessibility. You have to start with basic principles all the time. And it makes web developers look bad, too.
Private reply 25 min later
Liminal witch 🧙‍♀️ Sarah 37 min later

@zachleat Part of me thinks that there needs to be a generational change on the front-end.
A lot of people don't want to let go of sunk cost.
1. Private reply 47 min later
  1. Private reply 51 min later
    1. Private reply 1 hr later
devolute 38 min later

@zachleat Teach the marketing dept. how to find the INP issues table in Search Console. Teach the legal dept. to read the ADA compliance documentation.
Eric 41 min later

@zachleat I feel like tool chains exist to handle components in some way. So we need tools that let us build components without deviating as far away fro web standards. So obviously, you've done some of the work with 11ty and WebC to try to fix this.
1. Zach Leatherman 6 days later
  
  @ericmikkelsen Appreciate it Eric! I don’t think we can (exclusively) tool our way out, though. We need a coalition!!
Cory 47 min later

@zachleat by emphasizing standards *first*. Frameworks are tools that come and go. Learn the language, learn the standards and you'll be better equipped to pickup a framework required by a given job.
Slasher Calavera 🔪💀 49 min later

@zachleat I think this is, at least in part, a marketing issue: the standards-hostile tools tend to have big budgets behind them, at least historically, and with that comes brand familiarity on both ends of hiring.
Seeking out — and ✨ celebrating! ✨ — real-world examples built with tools aligned with web standards seems like a small place to start chipping away at this.
1. Slasher Calavera 🔪💀 52 min later
  
  @zachleat Not every conversation about front-end development has to be about industrial grade tooling, of course, but:
  - Who’s building things At Scale™ with Eleventy (et al)?
  - How did they successfully pitch that tool chain?
  - What benefits are clients seeing on the other side?
  would all be lovely things for standards-friendly advocates to reference or point to when having their own internal discussions ☺️
Private reply 1 hr later
1. Private reply 1 hr later
  1. Private reply 1 hr later
    1. Private reply 2 hr later
2. Private reply 6 days later
Dan Ryan 2 hr later

@zachleat the thing that first pops to mind is how HTML5 and CSS3 (as branding) were such boons to getting companies to hire on those standards. Even if they had no idea what they were saying. Maybe there’s a Vanilla Web branding that would have a similar effect?
1. Zach Leatherman 6 days later
  
  @d definitely a marketing problem (at least in part!)
Kickstink 4 hr later

@zachleat we already passed the point long ago where it was even possible for a small/single person team to take standards and accessibility seriously (properly seriously) and be able to ever actually ship anything and (the products and ourselves) stay up to date. And you can’t solve it by shouting at your boss, everyone over and under you is owned by the same shitty constraints.
Alexis Watson 12 hr later

@zachleat I'm not so arrogant as to claim to have a *good* answer. But:
I think it has to start with the people who make decisions about tooling to begin with, junior to principal. Revisiting why standards exist, who they serve, and (re)framing the conversation in those terms.
Heads start to turn when stakeholders ask questions like, "what do you mean we could have up to 25% more reach with an accessible website?"
1. Alexis Watson 12 hr later
  
  @zachleat I'd go a step further and suggest that changing hiring practices goes a long way. Test for what helps the org, the user, and the Web.
  We disallow frameworks in our standard exercise, and test for raw fundamentals, resourcefulness, and expressiveness. Results have been great so far.
  1. Zach Leatherman 6 days later
    
    @alexiswatson this is a really great answer 🏆
Hawk Ticehurst 15 hr later

@zachleat my bet is huge cultural change would happen if:
1) more content about these tool-chains was created that was tuned/catered towards what's cool/popular (think how HTMX memed their way to being relevant)
2) a hugely successful/profitable business was built using tools, techniques, and frameworks aligned with web standards
Thomas Michael Semmler 1 day later

@zachleat by surrounding yourself with the right people.
bryanwood 1 day later

@zachleat Running into this when hiring juniors :( they come in having only done react at previous job or school and have little distinction between it and the web.
Their first assignments the web.dev learning material to get a better grounding and shake off some of that weird react mental model.
wesruv 2 days later

@zachleat
I think a big part of this (that really bothers me) is web dev is becoming McDonalds/assembly line work.
We have bootcamps that can train in React (or similar), businesses that will overstaff in that expertise, and then every problem becomes a React problem.
It's not intrinsically *bad*, on some level it's easier to get large output this way.
The problem to me is this approach to web dev and running a business is being evangelized as the best way, and we have massive overuse of these tools.
1. wesruv 2 days later
  
  @zachleat
  I think it's great that there are bootcamps that can train you up.
  Once you get a job, dev leadership should be encouraging/training folks to broaden their skillset, but instead folks have to keep up with the churn of tooling/framework changes.
  I feel like when I started we were checking to see if folks could solve problems, and understood some of the base languages that are used at a dev shop.
  E.g. do you know HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, and focus on client management and troubleshooting.
  A department/business might tend to use Wordpress/Drupal/Joomla, but if a project came around that wasn't a good fit, dev mgmt would do some research instead of pulling out the golden hammer.
  1. wesruv 2 days later
    
    @zachleat
    My TL;DR is it's classic race to the bottom, sales/marketing driven myopic nonsense.
    We need speakers and evangelists that talk about the complexity, instead of evangelizing certain solutions. People that talk about pros and cons of stacks/approaches/etc.
    Instead I think we have a glut of cult of personality folks that love spicy hot takes that are easier to consume, but harmful at the scale it's happening.
    Also, the youths should get off my lawn, and the music is too loud now.
    1. Zach Leatherman 6 days later
      
      @wesruv A lot of truth ringing in this thread! I think the other piece that I think about a lot is the funding behind the projects going in non-standards-based directions
      1. wesruv 6 days later
        
        @zachleat
        💯💯💯^💯