Fantastic article.

It’s this kind of thing that people learning to be front end devs should be exposed to. Not just front end devs, anyone involved in the chain that leads to what the front end dev is doing.

We all have a joint responsibility to provide information for all and too frequently it’s left to the last person in the chain to try and fix it (by then it’s too late) and even though they haven’t been told to.

This is why I think I have a bit of a hatred for frameworks (they all have a place if used properly) as I constantly have to mop up behind people that are focusing on speed to market rather than quality of underlying code. It’s an education/culture thing, it’s wrong to attack people if they don’t know they’re doing it however those that do know and choose to carry on doing whatever they want because it “looks okay, lets just launch”, “It’s a single page app, we can do a million things on one page” or “has the latest Whizz Bang Widget doesn’t it look amazing”

Single biggest issue in front end web development in my opinion. It requires a change in culture, education and also professionalism, unfortunately the issue is extremely widespread and there is no real comeback for not doing things properly.

Thank you for covering this topic, it’s one that I care about deeply.

All this is important, but generally this is not taken into account during the project costing and therefore development because “we do not see” …

Important article, thanks a lot Francis.
Better semantics might also help to reduce complex css class-names. And to find better names more easily.

Thank you for the details to support what I’ve said for years: We front-end developers are the most important connection between the information and the end user. As such, we’re the most important “information architecture” practitioners because if we screw up, any value that the raw data had is ultimately lost. I don’t have a classical education in information architecture; I learned IA through my 20-plus years experience as a journalist and communications professional.

HTML is all about properly classifying information, but so few people realize that.