

Why front-end developers are so important to the future of businesses on the web - simonw
http://www.paulcarvill.com/2009/09/why-front-end-developers-are-so-important-to-the-future-of-businesses-on-the-web/

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simonw
I get pretty annoyed when I see people dismissing client-side engineering as
being somehow less challenging than server-side development - on the server,
you only have to get it working on one platform (and for all but the most high
traffic sites you can write code as badly as you like without much penalty).
Client-side engineers have 5 different rendering engines to deal with, need to
think about performance, accessibility, resizing, legibility... and that's
before you even get to the huge domain that is modern JavaScript.

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dkersten
Apologies for the slightly off topic comment: Whats the 5th rendering engine?
Text only, like lynx? Or mobile phone browsers? Or am I missing a popular one?
I'm counting WebKit (Safari, Chrome), Trident (IE), Gecko (Firefox) and Presto
(Opera). What am I missing?

Thanks!

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steerpike
You have to seperate the IE's.

Plus, 5 is a little lo when you also take into account screen readers and
other user agents.

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dkersten
Yeah and mobile devices and so on. I was curious as to which 5 were meant
though. Thanks.

