The Web is constantly evolving. This evolution brings many benefits and at the same time requires us to be always updated.
You can have the best web designers, the best web developers of front-end and back-end in your project yet, you risk not thinking any of them or development focused on the user. There is no use of having a beautiful and wonderful layout and better code if your project is heavy, slow and not perfect from usability and accessibility point of view.
Everyone knows that for a front-end developer knowing just the HTML and CSS is not enough. If the frond-end developer is a wizard javascript, mean he is the best? May be so, but what I intend to show in this article is something more simple, nothing technical, since not all just code. Knowing well the theory helps to direct you and hassle out of practice, this is the great challenge of professional front-end.
When we receive a layout, our mission is to create it faithfully using html, css and javascript with all possible good practices.
We need to:
- Validate in all browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer);
- that your code has pegged the content, meaning to take the project information to the user and also to machinery;
- Your code can receive and deliver the data to the bots, crawlers, crawlers and robots through micro and semantics;
- Responsive to a code;
- Layout that is accessible to users with various visual and motor absences.
The user can use any smartphone to view the contents or even a tablet, television, and why not in a fridge? The content must be accessible from all devices. Today these devices are already responsible for almost all access, but if we count the access device-specific, i.e., computers with screen readers, calipers for reduced mobility, with mobile voice assistant and who knows what else will come up, your code must reflect the information coherently.
Semiotics to Semantics
The designer transforms the customer’s need on a product in PSD or PNG format, for that he seeks in the semiotic essence of what you need. The front-end takes the output and applies semantic content so that relevant information is always properly understood by previous steps and mostly by the user. Marking the HTML should be the best possible and the back-end will try to translate what theweb designer thought and produced with the markup that did the front-end in order to bring the content or interaction improving the reading of information by that user. To deliver the best experience, the front-end developers should use a rich markup language, after all H1 to H6, p, a, quote, strong, section, article that are more than enough to interact with more diverse sets of content. The implementation of WAI-ARIA brings interaction for people with some cognitive absence or reduction.
Summarizing
The front-end developer needs the gift of gab, be the face of the chat, do talk with your code browsers, robots, devices, screen readers, this is not an easy task, it needs a lot of reading, practice and perform tests mainly.
Think of the user when creating layouts to develop your code to create an interaction. It’s almost a game where your html gets along with everything and everyone, because it is the basis for the back-end then continue with your good work. Your code is the meeting point which links the design to programming, so it is so important and needs to be very well done.
Developing and designing interfaces is not easy, however, the path is the focus on the user, because user is the one who will use it. Remember that!