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Web Design – The View from a Front-End Programmer
by Jade on May 7th, 2009
Here’s a little tidbit of info for those who might not quite know what the title web programmer really means.
- Right click a website (how about this one right here?)
- choose “view source”
All that gibberish is the main language of the web, html. When people talk about writing code, that’s the type of thing they’re talking about, they might be talking about php instead of html (French instead of English) but in broad terms knowing how the code works, makes you a programmer. What you do with that knowledge is what makes it an art form.
(404 error image courtesy of css-tricks.com. And yeah, CSS is yet another web language)
To break the concept of a web programmer down a bit more, there’s commonly two realms of programming on the net, front end and back end. Generally what differentiates that is a simple question, “will the user see it?” Meaning, will my visitors be viewing this, or “is this going to make the thing work”? Granted it’s not always that simple, and the two realms are usually intertwined to create a final product, but that’s the distinction I use.
I think the thing that makes a programmer lean in one direction or the other relies on how heavily they fall under the left or right brain concept. To be a programmer you have to value structure and logistics, no matter what type of programmer. However, I believe what pushes the front end crowd is a little bit of “foreign contaminant”. No mater how logical and exact a calculation should be, they can’t deny the intuitive, artistic side. It’s there and it wants to draw something, please.
So, how does this effect the web and all the companies and citizens that inhabit it? Well, the web is an interesting place that requires programming in order to run, but it also marries the left with the right and creates a place for front end programmers to practice their trade, on both sides of that fence.
The next time you’re involved with creating a website, web application, or web anything. You’re going to need a programmer. You probably should also ask yourself if you’ll need back end programmers to get the functionality you want, as well as a front end programmer to get the results you want.
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I couldn’t agree more; most of the really great programmers I’ve known have been artists on the side – interested in the world, in the fine arts, in creativity. I think that “contamination” can make the difference between serviceable code and elegant code.
Actually, there’s a significant difference between PHP (a programming language) and HTML (a description language). A programming language is designed to offer a computer a list of sequential instructions for performing a task.
In contrast, HTML is formally a description language which describes how text is to be formatted.
The line blurs at some point as new standards incorporate some forms of programmatic execution into description languages. Traditionally, however, languages such as PHP, Ruby, perl, C#, etc are all used to construct HTML which is then interpreted client-side by the browser.
The line is blurred primarily on the server side where a PHP page is loaded by the server, executed by a PHP interpreter, and used to render HTML which is then sent to the client (browser). The browser, however, never sees PHP. It only sees HTML.
@Robyn – Nicely said, elegant code can really be a beautiful thing, and I agree that it really does take an artistic hand to craft it into a piece of art.
@Jake – Very true, and thanks for adding that further clarification on the differentiation from server side and client side programming. I might have been a bit too broad in lumping all programming languages together. My goal with this post was to really stay from the perspective of someone on the outside who doesn’t really know what getting a ‘programmer’ means.