This-morning I had to quickly run up some questions for someone's second interview. We were looking for someone with good front end knowledge, so I knocked up some questions to ask them. I found these were very good at getting them talking, and gave them a lot of potential to show they had a strong knowledge in the field.
Let me know if you think there are some other good questions that will provoke some good discussions!
HTML Questions
- What is a doctype?
- What different versions of HTML are there, what's the difference between transitional and strict?
- What do you know about HTML 5, and do you think you will use it?
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of using web standards.
- Do you know what the trinity of web standards are? (Separation of, structure, behavior and presentation)
- What is the concept behind the semantic web, and why does it matter?
- Do you know what micro formats are?
- What related blogs or websites to you read?
Accessibility Questions
- What is accessibility and why does it matter?
- What should you put in alt text for presentational images?
- Why are, "click here" links bad to use?
- Why do people use skip to content and skip to navigation links?
- How can CSS aid accessibility?
- How can you test for accessibility compliancy? Why do automated tests not guaranty accessibility.
- What related blogs or websites to you read?
CSS Questions
- What is the difference between using inline CSS and using an external CSS file. When would you use inline CSS?
- What browser do you develop in?
- What browsers do you test in?
- What is the ACID2 test?
- Who or what is WASP?
- What are CSS hacks and what are they used for?
- What related blogs or websites to you read?
SEO Questions
- What would you said the main 4 search engines are?
- What would you say the most important element in the head of an HTML document are?
- What would you say the most important element in the body of an HTML document are?
- How do search engines treat content inside an IFrame?
- How can you convey information in an image to a search engine.
- How can you convey information in a flash movie to a search engine.
- What is keyword stuffing?
- What is cloning?
- How should you re-direct traffic from http://pixelbox.net to http://www.pixelbox.net ?
- What related blogs or websites to you read?
JavaScript Questions
- What is ECMAScript?
- What is the DOM?
- What is unobtrusive JavaScript? Why is it important? What is HIJAX
- How would you add a JavaScript event to a link or button, and why?
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of Frameworks?
- What would you do if a framework could not provide the functionality you needed?
- What frameworks have you used and why did you choose it?
- What is browser sniffing and where would you use it? (trick question... never!)
- What is Comet? What sites use it?
- What is JSON? Why would you use JSON over XML?
- What sites do you think use JavaScript well?
- What industry blogs do you read?
- How do you debug JavaScript
- What problems have you had with IE when DOM scripting and how have you overcome them?
- What related blogs or websites to you read?
Tools Questions
- What software do you use to develop in and why?
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of using WYSIWYG development tools?
- What browser do you use to develop in and why?
- What browser do you use on a daily basis, and why?
- What is any, plugins or bookmarklets do you use?
- What browsers do you test you work in?
- What operating systems do you test your work in?
- Do you use source control, if so what, if not why not?
- Do you develop locally or on a remote server?
- Do you know how to set up a web server, apache, MySQL etc