Not always a nail

I spend some time most days lurking around the GSAP forums and I have noticed a couple of recurring themes which I wanted to blog about, probably best summed up by the old saying if you only have a hammer every problem is a nail.

Now I have been around quite a while, certainly in web design timescales, cutting my teeth on table based designs, Dreamweaver and fixed width pages, ah the good old days, or probably not! However the workflow I developed over the next few years has been the basis for a skill set which still serves me well today albeit in updated tools and format and that is the focus of today's blog. Coincidentally a similar post was published this week here. – Front end Masters

Going back to the GSAP form mention above, nearly every question deals with using GSAP with another javascript library, Nuxt, Vue, React etc, often it seems having little in depth knowledge on using them or even the HTML or CSS they spit out, and this is a real shame. I often wonder whether these complex libraries, multiple dependencies, build pipelines are really required or are they simply being used because they are flavour of the month or that is all that is being taught to new entrants?

British comedian Les Dawson made a name by playing the piano badly, but in reality was an accomplished pianist, in other words he learnt his craft and then made fun of it, the core skills he learned allowed him to know how and when to break the rules and create something interesting and different. Apply the same thing to web design/development, without solid foundations you are building(code) on metaphorical sand. I still use the core tools I learned years ago, HTML, CSS, PHP and still upload using (S)FTP to servers. Yes I can code in javascript, build pipelines, deploy via GIT etc if needed but it is not my go-to tool when "simpler" solutions exist for the bones of the site.

Of course libraries like GSAP have made animation fun again and accessible to a wider base of coders, but when it comes to the skeleton of the site I genuinely believe the simpler, older options are often better and far more likely to still work five years from now. Our job is to solve clients problems in the most efficient way for them, not show off as to how clever we are by being able to use often badly and inappropriately the latest toy.