Don’t ignore reality

I am always amazed about the level of ignorance of some colleagues when writing articles or tools. I approve of any enthusiasm for modern techniques. Nevertheless, a clear view of the reality of our profession would help with some articles or tools.

Articles that jQuery suggest as obsolete, are no longer published in a monthly rhythm, as they used to. But there still are these articles. The last of this kind, which I recognized, was published with CSS-Tricks: “(Now More Than Ever) You Might Not Need jQuery“.

In this article the typical, simple examples of jQuery and the modern JavaScript equivalents are brought up. The first thing to notice is that jQuery code is scarcer and more elegant. The interesting part comes quite early in the article after the author has convinced us (almost) that we will create everything without jQuery from now on: neither IE, Edge, nor a mobile Opera variant can handle these new JavaScript-APIs. The author then recommends polyfills (plural!). He ignores that jQuery is also a kind of polyfill. And much more: it’s a big collection of bug fixes that the author does not even look at.

And the typical statement “when the IE finally died” can trigger big head shaking with developers who work in the enterprise environment. For large companies we can be glad if they have now updated to Windows 7. The lifetime of IE will certainly be very long there.

Quite freshly a CSS collection came under my eye, which does not see itself as a framework, rather as a toolset. Shoelace advertises that you do not need a preprocessor. Instead, the toolset builds on CSS variables. A nice idea as CSS-variables are really interesting. But they are definitely not suitable for wide-area use. A look at CanIUse shows, that no IE and the older Safari do understand CSS-variables. A website using Shoelace should have a declaration of minimum requirements, as if they were a game.

Also the author of Shoelace states again, “if you care about IE …”. The developers misunderstand our job. We do not need to be interested in IE. But we should be very interested in our users. It is not a problem to use techniques that are not understood in every browser, as long as there is a good fallback or the non-support is not otherwise noticed negatively. For CSS-variables, however, basic components of the CSS are not understood if the browser can not interpret them. The developer then delivers a half-broken CSS.

Other developers are thinking about accessibility, how a page can be used for as many users as possible. And the two colleagues mentioned here show all IE users simply the finger. In the first case, we should use polyfills; in the second case, the use of myth is recommended, a kind of preprocessor. It was the important feature of Shoelace that you would not need a preprocessor for those common elements, thanks to the CSS variables.

It does not help to hide the reality. The IE will not disappear so quickly. If Chrome and Firefox (rare Safari) have implemented new techniques, this is great. Edge will always keep the two of them on their heels. But in most large companies and public authorities the IE will be used for a long time. We must not ignore it. As much as it hurts.