Boggle The Mind

I am a “Front-End Architect”….or um, I’m trying my best to be one.

Garrett Dimon wrote a great article about the emergence of the Front-End Architect, and more specifically, what skills you need to be one these days.Garrett lists 14 seperate skillsets he believes is important for someone in that role, from the obvious (XHTML, CSS & JS) to others you’d expect (design, usability) but surprises a bit with how important he thinks programming knowledge is. While I’m not sure I completely agree with his example of the front end guy telling the back end engineer how to do things, I do agree that a good understanding of at least what is possible is a huge requirement.

This is a job title I’d love to see start showing up in Monster, as I (and others I hope) are starting to get pretty tired of job requirements that require the front-end developer to be a graphic designer as well, or the graphic designer to have a full understanding of how to take their Photoshop mockups and actually create the standards based XHTML and CSS from their designs as well.

I’m also glad that this role encompases more than the basic building of a web page, because it finally gives a bit more credability to the role, as most of these skills are not skills that the “amateur” using Dreamweaver in WYSIWYG mode would have.

I was working on a website realign tonight, and finally got around to testing a page in IE that I had implemented a Google Map on. Alas! The page did not load, and gave only an “Operation Aborted” error message. The code I was using worked just fine in Firefox:


if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) {

var marker = createMarker(point,’My Text Here‘)
map.addOverlay(marker);
}


I took some time to do a bit of debugging, and found that when I removed the two divs surrounding my included file, things worked OK. However, that still left me with quite a problem. Thankfully, I was not the first one to have this problem. A quick Google search led me to a page on RyanGrant.net about the Operation Aborted error message. Ryan had run into the same problem, and it was suggested on the Google Maps Google Group to load the map script using an onload event. Unfortunately, this was probably something I should have been doing already in the interest of good coding. Thankfully, a quick fix to my code managed to clear up the problem.


function createMap(){
if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) {

if(document.getElementById && document.createTextNode) {
window.onload=function(){
createMap();
}
}


Quite frustrating for IE to completely choke on the code as it was, and to provide such an abstract error message. Thankfully, it didn’t require any sort of hack, but only a simple cleaning of the code which improved it in the process anyway. Lesson learned - no more lazy coding!