What should every programmer know about web development?

Question

What things should a programmer implementing the technical details of a web application consider before making the site public? If Jeff Atwood can forget about HttpOnly cookies, sitemaps, and cross-site request forgeries all in the same site, what important thing could I be forgetting as well?

I'm thinking about this from a web developer's perspective, such that someone else is creating the actual design and content for the site. So while usability and content may be more important than the platform, you the programmer have little say in that. What you do need to worry about is that your implementation of the platform is stable, performs well, is secure, and meets any other business goals (like not cost too much, take too long to build, and rank as well with Google as the content supports).

Think of this from the perspective of a developer who's done some work for intranet-type applications in a fairly trusted environment, and is about to have his first shot and putting out a potentially popular site for the entire big bad world wide web.

Also, I'm looking for something more specific than just a vague "web standards" response. I mean, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS over HTTP are pretty much a given, especially when I've already specified that you're a professional web developer. So going beyond that, Which standards? In what circumstances, and why? Provide a link to the standard's specification.

Answer 1

Good knowledge of HTTP, including caching and expiry headers

Answer 2

Most of the essentials have been covered by the top 10 answers, but here are a few of the ones I missed up there:

• For browser compatibility testing, use browsershots.org (free) or better yet, litmus (cheap)

• For stress testing, use the command line tool ab - ApacheBench (on Linux/Mac OS X). It will let you find the 'heavier' pages, so you can do your performance tweaking where it will matter the most (that is, caching!). "A slow page is a DoS attack waiting to happen."

• If you, like most, will be using a web host rather than hosting your own web server, spend a couple of weeks (yes, weeks!) on the WebHostingTalk.com forum to get a feel for which hosting providers are currently the best in the lands. That forum is THE one and only gathering place for serious web hosting nerds, and these cats have the dirt on everyone. If you are serious about your web sites, you need to background check your hosting providers on WebHostingTalk.

• Use a remote distributed system for monitoring your uptime (e.g. to determine whether it's time to move to a different hosting provider) - host-tracker.com comes to mind, but there are many others

• Do not write your own CAPTCHA. I repeat: Do NOT write your own CAPTCHA!

Answer 3

make sure (unlike me) you dont develop your site using FF3 and IE8 and then at the end, check IE7 and see that it looks a mess and need to spend days tweeking it.

always check the site renders ok in a number of different browsers during development, dont leave it till the end.

Answer 4

Duplicate slashes in a path are normally harmless, but <a href="//index.html"> does not mean what you think it means.

Answer 5

If you implement a "I forgot my password" feature, don't email their password back in plaintext. Instead, email them a time-expiring link which will take them to a page that allows them to select a new password.

Answer 6

Begin by designing your page as if HTML was your only tool and JavaScript and CSS didn't exist, and make sure it validates. (This is not an excuse to use <font> tags, I'm talking about making good semantic code here!)

Then, add CSS (from an external file), and gently style your work, adding as little extra HTML as possible.

Finally, make your JavaScript (I'd use jQuery) enhance the user experience - again adding as little extra markup as possible.

Answer 7

Cross-browser support, particularly with respect to CSS.

Answer 8

One very important thing for UI Heavy Sites is taking care of screen resolution. It can totally make or break the UI experience of your site.

Answer 9

You should consult the OWASP web site and understand the vulnerabilities listed there. Keep in mind OWASP does not talk about issues like scalability, session state management issues, and browser compatibility. Those areas will need to be understood as well. But I would argue that they certainly are less important than security.

Answer 10

Web standards:

• HTML
• CSS
• XML
• JavaScript

HTTP protocols.
UI Design
Web Security
Web Caching
Some web server knowledge (Apache httpd, ISS, lighttpd)
LAMP

Answer 11

Have a basic understanding of Web Analytics so they can understand how the users are interacting with their site.

Answer 12

Set aside all the technical aspects, skills and security, I would make sure that it would be easy to use and really does the thing the user expect. Human computer interaction is important. Layot and flow is important. Otherwise no one will use it, other that scammers, spammers and robots.

:)

//W

Answer 13

HTTP Compression is often overlooked and can drastically speed up a website.

Answer 14

A web developer should know:

• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox
• That less is more
• How to decouple presentation (HTML, CSS) from business logic (JavaScript, backend)

Answer 15

• Web standards
• CSS
• Interface Design

If it's unusable, you have no chance!

Answer 16

Consider your design from your potential users perspectives. How will they use the site? What will benefit them most? What will annoy, frustrate, or keep them from using it? If you're trying to decide on a design element that will benefit you, but not the user, scrap it.

Answer 17

1. Cross Browser Compatibility

2. SEO

3. Horizontal /Vertical Scaling

4. Advantages/ Disadvantages of Caching

Answer 18

Especially for SEO, but for some other reasons as well: remove session id's from (public) URLs, that might have been added by the web framework for cookie-less browsers, but may not be required for public browsing anyhow.

Answer 19

Develop for Gecko and Webkit browsers first, then use conditional comments to address IE issues that cannot be fixed by tweaking CSS (e.g. for more specificity, rules that trigger IE's 'hasLayout', etc.)

Answer 20

Having a backup strategy is really important (as it's already been mentioned) but checking the backup is equaly as important. There is no point having 100s of backups if they are all corrupt. Your restoration strategy should be known and tested depending on the needs of the business.

Answer 21

What should a developer know before building a public web site?

What about the data?

1. Data normalization
2. Design Query structure of the data carefully
3. Optimize it and understand where to cache or not

Answer 22

You need very little knowledge to put a site out to the public. Don't forget that there are billions of sites out there, and you don't want to spend months of your valuable time building something that nobody wants.

All the skills you need are basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript to quickly throw up a prototype and put it out in front of the big bad web. Think about it this way - if you build out something really awesome in several months, let's say, and you put it out on web, and nobody clicks on that link to Get Started, then something has gone terribly wrong.

Either you were working on the wrong problem, or a problem that nobody had, or they didn't know they had a problem. You could simply test your early hypothesis by putting up a nice fancy mockup landing page with a link saying "Get Started", and when users click that, you take them to a thank you page asking them for their email/contact information to inform them for when you do actually go live.

I have recently been introduced to this idea of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which is very radical in terms of what it is. It's not a minimum viable product in the sense that most developers would think of it as. Here's a nice interview with Eric Ries that talks about the idea in detail - http://venturehacks.com/articles/minimum-viable-product.

Kent Beck, the creator of Extreme Programming methodologies had an interesting story to share in the Startups Lessons Learnt conference today in San Francisco. He had an idea of introducing a payment gateway to charge users for unlocking higher levels of a game he was building. They estimated it was going to take a little while to implement the whole thing, so he decided to just put up a button saying "Buy the Next Level" on the game page. When users clicked that link, they just let them into the next level without charging or anything. But it didn't hurt them at all as they didn't have a million+ user base, and they collected valuable information about how many users were actually willing to buy the next level.

So I would recommend you don't wait until you build a nicely polished and finished product before reaching out to your users. And to get started with that, you don't need a whole lot of knowledge. Basic HTML/CSS/JavaScript skills are more than sufficient to get started.

Answer 23

From a systems perspective, document how the application works and the subsystems involved and add instrumentation to the application for the systems in which it will run (e.g. event logs or performace monitor in Windows).

The application has to be run by some support personnel and they need tools to track possible problems that may appear.

Answer 24

I agree with "The Professor" there's no point in having a beautifully built site that validates correctly and is accessible to all if the content is rubbish. In addition to his comment though I'd add spell checking and proof reading. I find that the majority of tweaks that have to be made after the site has gone live is down to spelling/grammatical issues.

Answer 25

Understand how to monitor a site for intrusion and make it easy for the person who manages the site to recover to a known-good state. Even if you aren't going to be managing the site you should educate the site-owner in this regard before handing it over.

Even if your code is bulletproof, the server that the site is hosted on can be compromised (especially in a shared-server environment), so it seems like it's not so much a question of whether your site will be hacked, as when it will happen and how much pain will be involved in cleaning it up.

So you'll want to design with this in mind; e.g., craft your URL scheme such that it is easy to spot malicious requests in the access logs; think carefully before storing page templates in a database; and so forth.

Answer 26

Nothing. If you're building your first site, just build it. Get dirty, make mistakes and learn. Because after you've built hundreds and lots of advanced tricks are second hand to you, after you've done it all, seen it all, the one thing you'll always need to remember is the one thing you know when you start: you don't know everything. Especially if you're worried about security. Even if you cover all the bases, someone will come up with something new. It's the downside to being one of the Good Guys.

Answer 27

Need to know what is easy to use for the public, not for an IT professional or software developer.

Answer 28

I am new in Web Development and what I faced problem with are

1. Detail knowledge about JavaScript and Ajax.
2. Security. Specially XSS and CSRF etc.
3. Some knowledge about CSS even if there are dedicated designers for it.
4. Adherence of W3C standards or others.
5. Deployment issues and how to solve them.
6. Browsers and How they work. Same origin policy and why it is important.

Answer 29

Regarding credit cards and debit cards, at least within the United States, be aware of PCI compliance and the various rules and responsibilities that it covers. Accepting credit cards for a small e-commerce application can open a very nasty can of worms if the proper security measures are not in place. It goes way beyond having SSL enabled on the web site. Search for PCI-DSS on your favorite search engine and make sure you, and your clients, understand the regulations that they will need to follow. Other locales have similar rules under different names, but all of the major payment card players are getting serious about securing cardholder data.

Answer 30

This may have already been mentioned, but knowing how the client plans on updating the site. If the client has someone who "knows HTML", then prepare for problems. It's best to have a good CMS in place for updates if the client wishes to update the website themselves, NEVER let them have access to all of your code.