What are the things that get you excited about web development nowadays?
As for me, I'm excited that we have made a lot of progress with tooling in general over the past 20 years. CSS frameworks, methodologies, and a tool like premium WordPress visual builders like Divi Theme are where it's at. I want more of them to make my process even more efficient and hassle-free. What about you?
The changes to CSS that make it even more viable to separate presentation from the content. In particular the CSS "grid layout module" (horrible inaccurate name, great tech) with its ability to re-arrange an entire layout REGARDLESS of source order means you can maintain proper semantics and logical document order for non-visual users, without being in conflict with your screen media layout.
On top of how for proper elastic semi-fluid layout we're no longer limited by floats and negative margin tricks, or even goofier tricks such as those pulled by frameworks.
grid-template-areas is probably the most powerful technique to come along, and frankly it's the type of thing that probably should have been a part of CSS from the start.
It has also been extremely encouraging how quickly browser adoption was. It's interesting to see a technology created by Microsoft actually get adopted without significant heel dragging -- even if the final version deployed in all major current browsers is relatively incompatible with the draft specification found in Internet Explorer. Even Edge who you'd expect to be late to the party were up and running mere months after RoW. More telling is how Safari had it the same time as Blink -- fascinating given how on so many other fronts Safari has been aging like milk ever since Google forked off Blink from Webkit, and absconded with all the real talent at the same time.
I would say it's shocking how quickly once it was decided to be done how all four major browser engines (EdgeHTML, Gecko, Blink, and Webkit) all got support in place inside of a year -- to be frank we've NEVER seen that before. You compare to flex, where we STILL have major significant rendering differences across browser engines -- or how many major browsers still struggle to even reach HTML 4 compliance -- and it indicates that moving forward we may FINALLY be getting a mechanism in place for genuine improvements in the various specifications to be real-world deployable in a year or two, instead of a decade or two!
Particularly encouraging is it also shows a lack of partisanship on the part of browser makers and the W3C... unlike the constant belittling of features introduced by M$ that they spent a decade and a half dragging their feet on -- webfonts, word-wrap:break-word, and all the other fancy CSS3 stuff that were introduced in IE5 a decade before anyone was even talking about there BEING a third release of CSS -- a feature they introduced as proprietary, was suggested as a draft, and hit a final release that all browsers adopted spanned a relatively short five years. That from the 'final' version of the spec dropping to full-on browser support in three of the four engines was under six months? MIND-BLOWING given the history of browsers fully and properly implementing new features.
So it's not just the new tech I find exciting, but the change in attitude and speed-up of adoption cycles.
Particularly as these types of changes make it easier to build proper semantics and to then style / augment it in a manner that makes so many older techniques and much of the alleged "improvements" of frameworks look outright decrepit by comparison.
I mean, if we're going to try to find / create better ways of doing things, MAYBE we could do it by improving the specifications, having it native to the browser, and without pissing on the intent of HTML and 'requirements' like accessibility from orbit?
That said techniques are also easier to allow to gracefully degrade for older browser users (oh noes, someone still using IE doesn't get my columns and full-height layout, notz thatsies!) is the icing on the cake, and was one of the reasons CSS was even created in the first place.
Though much like the enhancing of caching models, focus on semantics in the markup, and separation of presentation from content, the graceful degradation aspect does tend to go unused or ignored by the people who can see no further than the screens they are seated in front of -- aka the apologists for all the fat, bloated, slow, ineptly coded disasters like HTML/CSS frameworks.
We're getting more and more tools to speed up doing it RIGHT, which combined with the accessibility and existing speed of development when practicing semantic markup with separation of presentation from content, a lot of these "shortcuts that really aren't shortcuts" are going to be harder and harder for the ignorant and incompetent to defend.
Shame we don't have a "modern" HTML specification to match, what with a good chunk of HTML 5 setting us back twenty years.
That Edge is working on web components so we'll finally have support on all browsers for custom elements 😃 I've been waiting for all browsers to support it to start using them.
Ben Buchanan (200ok)
I make some bits of the web.
The native tech has become really nice to work with. Modern HTML, CSS and JS (ES6) are so much better than they used to be!