Questions every good web UI developer should be able to answer

Question

By "web UI developer", I mean someone whose primary job is to craft pages using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. They should probably be able to learn enough PHP or Rails or something to get by when creating pages that draw their information from a more sophisticated back-end, e.g.,

<div>Your <?=$subscription['title']?> Subscription</div>

This will usually entail working with one of the standard JS libraries - Prototype, JQuery, whatever - and may also require integrating third-party JavaScript like Livepipe for prettification.

I think this set of skills is general enough that any web-based company is going to use a person for this. (If not, please feel free to edit the question until it is!) So what are some examples of questions that you'd ask a person applying for this position? What would raise a red flag if they couldn't do/answer it?

Answer 1

Describe the need for separation between HTML and CSS.

Answer 2

Which browser isn't compatible with the W3C CSS specification?

Ok answer: IE6.

Really good answer: all browsers.

What's the difference between HTML and XHTML?

What is a CSS framework?

Do you hand-code your HTML?

Answer 3

"Which browser do you use to test your design?"

• Shitty answer: "Anything but IE."
• Bad answer: "Browser?"
• Good answer: "All of them."
• Really good answer: "I use X browser. I have minions to make my design compatible on the rest."

Answer 4

Only one question, really:

What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow ?

Answer 5

What elements would you use to build the following? Please list or draw the elements and explain why.

• A navigation menu

• A clickable list of place names

• A default page layout with a page title, and three paragraphs of text, each paragraph with a table of its own.

there is no "right" answer and there will be huge stylistic differences, but if the whole code consists of <div></div> you'll have a strong pointer.

Answer 6

Miscellaneous:

• Is CSS's !important safe to use?

• How would you implement CSS specific to IE, or a certain version of IE?

• Why do some sites have problems with a lot of external style sheets on one page? Why do they strive to reduce the number of those references, sometimes compiling them all down to one file?

• What JavaScript frameworks have you used?

Bonus:

• What is the benefit of using CSS sprites?

• A client wants to have all headings in their corporate font. Do you know some approaches to solve this, and the up- and downsides to them?

Answer 7

Is there any good reason to use XHTML over HTML?