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CSS CSS Foundations Selectors Grouping and Modifying Selectors

Boris Vukobrat
Boris Vukobrat
4,248 Points
Posted by Boris Vukobrat
Boris Vukobrat
4,248 Points

DRY and WP (and others)

As I entered front-end technologies, first I noticed how popular is WP.

If we inspect the mostly auto-generated code of fancy pages, we could notice it is not just far away from DRY, it is full of junk code. Even more entire sites online are full of useless files and Mb's. It's Wet Press more likely.

I guess, everything is sacrificed at the throne of saving developer's time. And doing job without much digging into code.

So, my question is, to more experienced colleagues, where in essence nowadays, is the place of web development with doing it from scratch (with clean and quality code)? Well, from templates too, if they are ok.

1 Answer

Byron Twogood
Byron Twogood
14,631 Points
Byron Twogood
Byron Twogood
14,631 Points

I think a lot of it has to do with ease of use for users who are NOT web savvy. Sites like WordPress, Webs, etc make it easy-ish for Joe Schmoe to get on and build a website all by themselves. I'm sure there's a lot of code that ends up in there that is completely unnecessary or redundant simply because it HAS to be there to achieve the effect the user is looking for. I've noticed when I use the "Visual" vs "HTML" tabs in WP's page editor, there's a lot of junk that ends up being posted. Anchors that are unnecessary, placement code that is pointless, full syntax coding instead of abbreviated coding...

I'm sure there will always be the need for "ground-up" code writers. But we are also setting the pace and the standard for future coders. It MAY be that within 10 years, there will be enough templates and shortcuts out there that one could theoretically build an entire dynamic and responsive website in as little as 10 minutes. However, until that day comes, there will always be the need for writing the most basic code from scratch.

Not sure if that's what you were getting at, but that's my $.02.