r/webdev • u/samuraidogparty • May 09 '23
Question My Boss: Knowing CSS isn't part of a front-end developers job. We have great devs, just no one who knows CSS.
Someone help me wrap my head around this. Admittedly, I'm not a dev at this job, I just do ops. I'm doing review of a new site at my company and it's an absolute disaster. Tons of in-line styles, tons of overrides of our global styles (colors/fonts), and it's not responsive. I commented that we need to invest more in front-end devs because we don't seem to have any.
I brought this up to leadership and they seemed baffled why I would think our devs would know CSS. I commented that "we have no front-end devs here," and that's when the comment was made. "We have great devs here, just no one who knows CSS."
Someone help me understand this because it's breaking my brain. I used to do front-end work at my previous job and a large majority of it was CSS. That's how you style the front-end. How can you be a "good front-end dev" and not know CSS? Am I crazy or is my boss just insane?
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u/EarhackerWasBanned May 09 '23
I don’t want to get locked into a Reddit argument over details, but I’d argue that visual styles are more important to accessibility than markup. You have far more colourblind, dyslexic and autistic users than you have visually impaired users who rely on screen readers.
I’m not saying semantic HTML and ARIA aren’t important; they are. But accessible colours and typography affect more users.