Four years ago I wrote about something that has long puzzled me in the world of front-end development. Trust:
The mindset I’ve noticed is that many developers are suspicious of browser features but trusting of third-party libraries.
Developers are more likely to trust, say, Bootstrap than they are to trust CSS grid or custom properties. Developers are more likely to trust React than they are to trust web components.
That post got some thoughtful responses but I never really understood the imbalance of trust and suspicion:
I’m kind of confused by this prevalent mindset of trusting third-party code more than built-in browser features.
But something happened recently that helped me understand that mindset better.
I wrote a while back about how the datalist element on iOS has been completely fucked up. It’s worse than if Safari simply didn’t support it.
Breaking the web like that should be a five-alarm fire, but nobody is in any rush to fix it. I recall a similar lackadaisical attitude when Safari completely broke their implentation of IndexedDB.
I had it in my head that browser features followed a forward path generally. They’d be iterated on and improved on to iron out any glitches, but it was reasonable to expect things to get better with each new version of a browser.
Now I see that’s not necessarily the case.
Had I used an over-engineered JavaScript library instead of the datalist element, I wouldn’t be facing the current situation of having to use browser-sniffing to avoid sending a standard HTML element to any browser on iOS.
Sure, that third-party JavaScript would mean that users are downloading more code, and it probably wouldn’t work well with assistive technology, but as long as I didn’t touch it, it would continue to work. That should be true of web standards—I should be able to use them secure in the knowledge that they won’t suddenly shit the bed.
Perhaps I should be grateful to Apple for dispelling my naïveté. I now have much more empathy and understanding for web developers who are suspicious of web standards and prefer to use third-party libraries instead.
This was another fantastic conference from the Clearleft team, and one that I hope is repeated next year. It is absolutely incredible what you can do in the browser these days, and even though I thought I was keeping up with the latest developments, it astounded me how far things have come.
Web development follows a familiar cycle. First we glue together a solution with whatever we have — JavaScript, image hacks, Flash, anything. Then the platform matures, and CSS or HTML eventually makes that same workaround native. Rounded corners, custom fonts, smooth scrolling, sticky positioning: all of these started as JavaScript-heavy hacks before CSS turned them into a single declaration.
We are in another one of those transition moments. A new wave of long-requested CSS features is finally landing, and many of them are explicitly designed to replace patterns that used to require JavaScript. Not as approximations — as first-class platform primitives that handle the edge cases, run in the right thread, and need zero dependencies.
