Comment by Sharlin

> A lot of programmers may not know this, but frontend used to be a highly specialized skill, requiring knowledge of semantic HTML, CSS, the differences of various browsers, accessibility, progressive enhancement, network performance, interface design and user testing

As someone who didn’t really know that being a front-end dev putatively doesn’t involve thinking about those things anymore, I think that list conflates a couple of different things.

Things like the differences between browsers and CSS/HTML quirks, needed to wrangle a document markup language into creating user interfaces, are accidental complexity caused by particular path dependencies, and if they can be abstracted out, that’s a great thing.

Accessibility, interface design, performance, and other things related to user experience, on the other hand? Those are mostly orthogonal. A UI framework can raise (or in some cases lower) the bottom in the sense of facilitating reuse of (hopefully well-designed) components, but no framework is going to make your UI accessible or well designed by itself.

In the fabled past, frontend development didn’t require you to be highly qualified in these matters – web UIs were simply terrible, mostly. High skill level was not required because nobody expected anything from web UIs beyond the barest core functionality.

There was UI programming before the web [citation needed]. In a sense it was "deskilled" because you used a "framework" aka the OS windowing and widget libraries rather than drawing rectangles manually (except in some special cases like games where very custom UI is desired – but those custom controls invariably have roughly 0% of the UX affordances provided by standard ones). Back then, Visual Basic and other RAD tools (anyone still remember that acronym?) were front line of "deskilling", but honestly WYSIWYG visual design is still one of the best ways to create UIs, it’s just rarely done these days for various reasons.