"There's far too much "slap it together" code dragging down both the user's experience and our collective reputation."
This, perhaps, is most true in those who term themselves user interface developers. They probably started with HTML and CSS, and started learning Javascript from snippets pasted across the net in the early 00's. Unfortunately, most never took the time to actually learn the language, so these days they just slap together jQuery plugins and call it a day... crossing their fingers that it works, and having no idea what to do -- other than an ugly hack. Like user agent sniffing (something about jQuery not being fully compatible with IE6. If you've run into these issues, you know what I mean. Prototype is even worse -- hell, it doesn't realize that you can actually determine what the rendered CSS of an element is...).
This, perhaps, is most true in those who term themselves user interface developers. They probably started with HTML and CSS, and started learning Javascript from snippets pasted across the net in the early 00's. Unfortunately, most never took the time to actually learn the language, so these days they just slap together jQuery plugins and call it a day... crossing their fingers that it works, and having no idea what to do -- other than an ugly hack. Like user agent sniffing (something about jQuery not being fully compatible with IE6. If you've run into these issues, you know what I mean. Prototype is even worse -- hell, it doesn't realize that you can actually determine what the rendered CSS of an element is...).