Front-end development isn’t real development?

There is some sentiment out there that front-end development isn’t real development. It’s a swaggering, trollish sentiment. Still, it’s fun to puff our chests back sometimes. Let’s try to put a point on why front-end development is every bit as difficult and worthy of the title as any other subset. The practice of front end development is similar to playing the bass: it’s easy to learn but difficult to master. There is a lot more to it than HTML and CSS We have to deal with cross browser compatibility. This was far and away the most cited gripe in the group. While Internet Explorer continues to be the brunt of most jokes, every browser has its own quirks that often require special development techniques to overcome. It’s rather expected of us that we know how to build websites that can work cross-browser. We should know what browsers support what and how to debug and overcome browser-specific issues. We should know how to do emulate or otherwise test on a variety of...