Three General Questions about Web Development

Today on the CSS Beauty’s Skill Share forum, three “General Questions about Web Development” were raised. I found the questions basic and obvious – yet I realized their answers were crucially important.

The questions were asked by Tobias Varland, an admit-ably new-to-the-field freelancer. John Riviello, of Allegis Group, was first to respond; I’d say he did so perfectly (brief and to-the-point).

1. How important is it to design for the absence of CSS?
Very important; search engine spiders and blind users surf the web without CSS. Plus it forces you to think about semantics in your markup, which will improve your code.

2. For JavaScript, do you prefer to do it yourself or use 3rd party libraries?
I also prefer to write it myself because of the same reasons you specified. I have my own library of functions that I use often among projects and I like being able just to add the code I need for each project instead of including an entire JS library when I only need to use a couple functions from it.

3. Is it okay to make JavaScript a requirement for a site?
I’d try to avoid making it a requirement if at all possible. Graceful degradation really is the way to go because you want the content to be accessible to as many users as possible. Also search engine spiders do not parse JavaScript.

Continue reading the discussion on these three questions online: “General Questions about Web Development”

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