Web Standards Days: Eternal Front End Values

Attending conferences is not only a chance to meet with colleagues and join the community, but also an opportunity for professional growth. If circumstances allow you to take part in such events, be sure to do it! Following my own advice, on January 28, I visited Web Standards Days . If for some reason you missed this conference, you can catch up on YouTube, where a full day's recording has already been posted . Records of individual reports will appear later, but for now I will share personal impressions.

The first thing to note is that the conference turned out to be quite popular and gained an impressive number of participants. Even the registration had to stand in a queue, and during the reports themselves, many listened to the speakers standing up, as all visitors simply had no place. Despite this slight inconvenience, as well as the fact that I was at this event for the first time, it did not leave me feeling that I was in the right place. I would like to say a special thanks to the WSD team for the atmospheric lampiness, as well as the occasion to see again many familiar faces of the front-end community. Matches and occasional meetings at such events do not cease to amaze, but more on that later. The main thing that I would like to report concerns the general trends that have been observed between the reports. At once I will make a reservation that I will only talk about the speeches that I listened to in person. Still, the event took place on Saturday after a long week of work, and simply did not have the strength for everything.

First, what would this conference be like if React was not discussed at it? Where without him! All the front-hipsters enjoyed the speech of Alexandra Vorobyeva about how they use this framework in their project of the Unified Frontal System for Sberbank. A package of bem-react-core, which the author of the report, Vladimir Grinenko, jokingly described with the phrase “as much as a smoothie in his veins is getting cold!” Caused no less interest.
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At the same time, as the metainer accurately noted to all of us the well-known SVGO Lev Solntsev, the frameworks come and go, but the “eternal values” remain. Given the fact that he created his first website back in 1999, his opinion on this issue can be trusted: he had plenty of time to follow the typical trends in the frontend market. So what are the "eternal values" in question? Namely, about the base HTML / CSS / JS and specifications, knowledge of which is necessary in the first place. Both Lev and Vadim Makeev spoke about this in his report “My vanilla CSS”, and Sergey Popov, who shared his experience and advice as a mentor, and Vsevolod Shmyrov, who spoke about the games implemented in the browser using only the web specification. The general conclusion from all this information is that the focus on the base mentioned above is clearly visible on the front end market. And it can not please me!

I will explain. In the pursuit of the study of preprocessors, collectors, libraries and frameworks, many overlook the fact that without knowledge of "eternal values" it is impossible to be a full-fledged specialist. I fully support this position and join the words of Vadim Makeev about the fact that various collectors and other "magic" should improve the project, but it should work without them. You can and should use plug-ins, for example, to minify files, but even without this upgrade, the project should still remain viable. Of course, we all understand that in most cases, to view the result of work in the form of at least one finished page of the site, you need to run 100,500 tasks, compile all your Sass-files and make the whole thing out. But this does not mean that this situation is normal.



By the way, I’m not sure that we need to completely abandon the Fantasy Style Sheet (in Vadim’s terminology), that is, all this “sugar” and various fictions that do not exist in CSS. Over time, the best features and features somehow begin to take root and are implemented in the new specifications. An example is CSS variables. Similar trends can be seen in the borrowing capabilities of CoffeeScript in ECMAScript. Therefore, you should always dream and try something new. Who knows, all of a sudden what you come up with one day will be in the specification!

In conclusion, as I promised, I want to return to the atmosphere and the people at the event. I was very glad to see my former and current students, colleagues from work or from other companies, already beloved speakers and just familiar faces who were remembered from previous similar meetings. Feeling part of a community and being surrounded by so many caring people is an indescribably pleasant feeling. Moreover, on Web Standards Days I met even the guys I studied with on the online courses. It was a long time ago, we never saw each other alive, but we recognized each other! A couple of phrases and stories, and I instantly remembered both themselves and their work, falling into nostalgia for those times. Because then there were more fears than results. And now the conference provided an opportunity to recall our first teachers just like that, between times, the way we competed with each other, laugh at funny stories from the past, which at that time was for us a real adventure and challenge.

Definitely, all possible activities need to be attended! I will be glad to see everyone at such events. Here is a small list of dates and places where I recommend to get to you and try to be there myself:

• CodeFest April 1-2 in Novosibirsk;
• piterccs_conf June 16 in St. Petersburg.

If I missed some important event, tell us about it in the comments. If you yourself were at WSD on January 28, also share your emotions and thoughts about the reports in the comments. It will be interesting to learn something that I myself did not pay attention.

And most importantly, remember: frameworks come and go, but eternal values ​​remain!