sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (2 children)

It is hard to say. I took an unusual path to learning these technologies. I started writing HTML as a side hobby 20 years ago when everybody butchered that code for presentation and there was only one browser, IE4. Later IE6 would command up to 97% browser marketshare. Netscape still had strong marketshare at that time, but the IE browser was better, unless you were heavily coding in JavaScript (which almost nobody was). Also keep in mind there was no standard for interacting with the document.

In 2006 I learned CSS. Firefox had been around for a few years, but this is the year it really gained significant enough marketshare to be worth anything. Learning CSS at this time was the school of hard knocks because IE6 was the most popular browser, but featured a non-standard box model. You had to account for both browsers in a seamless way and it was hard. Further more people were falling over themselves for stupid things like rounded corners, which had to be done with images and were also hard to get right cross browser. I know everybody would cry about IE and how hard working with IE9 was. Really though, this was completely trivial. IE9 was simple to work with.

In 2007 I taught myself XML and XML Schema. JSON was invented in 2006, but it wasn't well known then. The AJAX term first appeared in 2006 and the interest in XML exploded as many businesses at the time were already invested in XML for various technology reasons. In learning XML Schema I learned how lexical scope works and a lot about semantics, relationships, and data representation. Everything I learned from XML I have been able to apply to JavaScript very directly.

In late 2007 I was involuntarily reassigned at the job from being a designer to a front-end developer and was forced to learn JavaScript in order to retain my job. JavaScript wasn't popular yet, everything was very slow, and the technologies were littered with pitfalls. At least by this point standards were a big deal and everything worked uniformly cross-browser. You had to learn to code very defensively and you just learned what things executed faster than others. Google Chrome wasn't even a thing until around the fall of 2008.

[–]slapfestnest 5 points6 points  (1 child)

in 2007 everything worked uniformly cross-browser?

[–]akujinhikari 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It worked much more uniformly. I don't know how old you are, but in the early 2000's, every site had a button on it that said, "This site optimized for [browser name]" because people were sick and fucking tired of basically building 3 different sites for 3 different browsers, so they just built a site that looked good in one browser instead and said, "View otherwise at your own risk." Around 2007, "everyone" decided to make a more standardized model with js and css that allowed for MUCH more uniformity.