Andrew Pow­ell has weighed in his thoughts on devel­op­ers and how well they do (or do not) know SQL in You Think You Know SQL, Don’t You? While I work on one project with a ded­i­cated DBA, for most projects I am in charge of design­ing the data­base and writ­ing the queries myself. On a gen­eral scale I would con­sider my data­base skills to be quite good — but there are def­i­nitely sit­u­a­tions where I will seek out the help of those with more spe­cialised skills.

The points Andrew raises are inter­est­ing because in my mind, you could quite eas­ily sub­sti­tute “HTML” for “SQL”, “front end coder” for “DBA” and “CSS” for “queries” — and his post would reflect my thoughts on that mat­ter entirely.

A lot of devel­op­ers get forced into writ­ing SQL HTML as part of their jobs. Should they be doing it? I don’t think so. It’s not nec­es­sar­ily the best of ideas, and in MOST cases should prob­a­bly be avoided at all costs. Besides, devel­op­ers can­not be experts in every lan­guage or tech­nol­ogy right? Some­thing has got to give some­where. It’s usu­ally their SQL HTML skills that suffer.

Devel­op­ers are, some­times, forced into sit­u­a­tions where they have no choice but to write their own SQL HTML. There is either no DBA front end coder, a DBA front end coder who isn’t inter­ested in help­ing devel­op­ers with their queries CSS, or a DBA front end coder who isn’t even in the devel­op­ment loop (never a good sign). In these cases, devel­op­ers may have to write their own SQL HTML. Some­times devel­op­ers have to know their lim­i­ta­tions when it comes to writ­ing queries CSS, espe­cially com­plex queries CSS. I don’t think a lot of devel­op­ers do truly know their skill lim­i­ta­tions. Yet, these intre­pid souls will trudge on think­ing they can write SQL HTML just fine. When, in real­ity, they really and truly do not know the lit­tle tricks and tweaks that can make the SQL HTML per­form better.

Heh, it does work, doesn’t it? Like SQL, I think HTML/CSS suf­fers from being con­sid­ered less impor­tant than the appli­ca­tion code itself. Also like SQL, opti­mised HTML/CSS can make a huge dif­fer­ence to not only how well the web appli­ca­tion or site works (think cross-browser issues, load­ing speed, etc), but how easy it is to main­tain going forward.

Andrew rounds out his post with some tips for devel­op­ers to improve their SQL skills, and once again with just a few word sub­sti­tu­tions we can bor­row his ideas to apply to front end code.

First, he sug­gests using an ORM (Object-Relational Map­ping) frame­work like Trans­fer. For HTML and CSS, I would sug­gest look­ing at a CSS frame­work. Blue­print received a lot of cov­er­age when it was launched late last year. More recently, the 960 grid sys­tem has been released, which is inter­est­ing in that it pro­vides a “kit” of sup­port­ing mate­ri­als includ­ing tem­plates for Fire­works, Omn­i­graf­fle, Pho­to­shop and Visio. There are oth­ers out there — Smash­ing Mag­a­zine has a handy round up of some of the more pop­u­lar CSS frame­works and also quickly cov­ers the advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of CSS frameworks.

Next, Andrew sug­gests using a good DBA. This most def­i­nitely applied to HTML and CSS — use a good front end devel­oper, graphic designer and inter­face designer. In some cases you’ll get all of those wrapped up in one indi­vid­ual, but some­times that’s not the case. Typ­i­cally the amount of front end coder time needed will be tiny com­pared to the amount of appli­ca­tion pro­gram­mer time needed, and an invest­ment in just a few hours can make all the difference.

Finally, when other options are not viable, Andrew sug­gests engag­ing an out­side con­sul­tancy. The same most def­i­nitely applies to front end coders — and luck­ily, good design­ers and front end peo­ple are are far eas­ier to find than data­base experts!

So what do you think — is hav­ing a good, solid pre­sen­ta­tion layer just as impor­tant as hav­ing a good, solid data­base layer? Do you think that writ­ing good HTML and CSS is an art form, like good SQL? Are appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers forced to write HTML and CSS when they shouldn’t be? Leave your thoughts in the comments.