Several years ago, Art+Logic settled on Vue.js as our preferred frontend Web framework. Now, in 2024, we feel it's time to revisit the frontend framework landscape to see how things have (or haven't) changed.

Since the early days of the Web, there has been tension between the ideal of "semantic HTML" and the practical reality of designing complex page layouts, which often could not be achieved without inserting style concerns into the document. More recently, frameworks like Tailwind CSS have emerged which challenge the very idea that semantic HTML is an ideal to strive for, and which commit to thoroughly embedding style concerns into HTML documents. With modern CSS features however, semantic HTML is more achievable than ever, and I do think it remains a worthy goal.

Good code style, being highly subjective, is something often debated among developers. After all, we spend more time reading code than writing it, so it's worth making sure our code is styled to be as easy as possible to read and to understand. On the other hand, deciding upon and continuously enforcing a style is also time-consuming, and the benefits are near-impossible to quantify. Given that modern code formatting tools can fully automate the process, is it still worth fretting about style?

Leveraging third-party libraries and frameworks is essential in most modern software projects, and the projects we build at Art+Logic are no exception. The pressure on developers to rapidly deliver features is high, and there are so many commonalities in the details of each project (particularly in Web development) that a lot of development time can be saved by using well-designed libraries that handle the details.

CSS preprocessors like Less, Sass and Stylus have long provided powerful features that vanilla CSS lacked: variables, nesting of rulesets, mixins, control flow constructs, etc. These days however, the feature gap is considerably narrower, and it's not so clear that the benefits of a preprocessor outweight the burdens of setting it up.

When I'm not coding the "impossible" at Art+Logic, I take a lot of interest in new programming technologies and paradigms; even if they're not yet viable for use in production, there can often be takeaways for improving your everyday code.

Fair warning: The following article is long, rambly, and contains no code. It does, however, contain some rumination on the idea that everyone can and should learn to program.