The Creature

PHUUHIN ONNA RRRIIITZ

What is this?

A guide and a list of tools to aimed at helping you make your own franken-site.

What do I do with it?

1. Get Skeleton from the Skeleton Framework page.
2. Run through the list of Bones and pick out the things you'll need.
3. Put 'em together and make your own monster.

So this is a field guide for cobbling together various parts to make a cohesive site?

You got it.

Why?

The web is a gnarly, mixed up place to build things. The execution and rendering environments for our code are wildly inconsistent, given to a constantly shifting, heaving landscape. Data comes and goes like a breeze. The communities are volatile, ever changing. The tools, likewise.

As developers, we seek to make our lives easier by doing a bunch of redundant work up front so we can focus on the important stuff.

Doing that for the web is hard (see above). A handful of really successful projects have done it well, and have become huge in the process.

Mobile is more important every second, driven by the proliferation of more affordable, more powerful devices. Driven by increasing the sheer accessibility of the web. More people on the web is better for people and the web.

So we shift our focus. Huge can be a problem if you're targeting users on weak networks. Huge can result in slow, and huge can result in difficulty extending and maintaining.

Rather than one huge package, many small packages. Rather than everything included, only what's needed. This gets tricky too, though. Keeping things isolated and modular, reducing redundancy. The browser makes this hard.

Big framework or no, we end up creating franken-sites, mashing together various libraries and components in pursuit of getting things done.

We end up making The Creature.

Here, as an experiment, we'll collect a simple guide, some straightforward tools, and a list of small, quality components. This guide will server any who use it, but it'll be aimed at less experienced developers. It will seek to illustrate common practice and help people avoid pitfalls. It will provide a handy field guide to sourcing UI components and rolling them into your projects.