I’ve been working a lot with Bootstrap lately. It’s really a breath of fresh air given what web developers have had to deal with over the years. These days, thanks to frameworks like Bootstrap and JQuery, all the non-value adding parts of front end web development are pretty much done for you.
The first era of web development was FONT tags and nested TABLE tags. This lasted till about the early 2000s. The web was very ugly back in those days and front end development was a big mess of incompatible browser features and quirks. Reading front end books was depressing as each feature usually had a section dedicated to how it worked in the standard and how it worked in Internet Explorer and all the little things one had to do to get it to work.
The second era of the web was basic CSS and IE6 dominance. IE6 was terrible, but at least it wasn’t a constantly moving target. Firefox was slowly gaining market share, but IE6 was pretty much the standard. AJAX apps started creeping in when Firefox implemented a similar AJAX API that mimicked what IE6 used. Google used this small improvement in functionality to create many key innovations such as Gmail and Google Maps. JQuery’s rise in the mid 2000s made this functionality work easily across platforms by working out all the cross platform bugs in the Javascript DOM and AJAX APIs. I’ve read through some of the annotated code for JQuery. The amount of code for getting some features to work right is formidable.
The third era occurred with the rise of the smartphone and Chrome. This was an era where Internet Explorer’s browser share began its steady decline and there was an explosion in new browser features and demand for responsive design for mobile browsers. Things were being managed on the Javascript side by JQuery, but the front end started to become a very complicated stew of technologies. CSS properties had many browser specific variants and there was a definite danger that only the most dedicated front-end developers could master it all.
The fourth era we are entering now is the era of CSS frameworks, mainly Bootstrap. Bootstrap is doing for front end design what JQuery did for Javascript, and that’s a good thing. Developers who are not dedicated to front end design like myself can easily pick and choose features from Bootstrap and they will look reasonably good in mobile and on almost all browsers. It’s truly a great time to be a full-stack developer.
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