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I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer

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Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer

#71

Post by toddmorey »

9999 wrote: post #30
ebiester wrote: post #10

I felt too lazy to be a Flex programmer. After years in HTML-land, MXML programming felt like an absolute kludge and Adobe's flex tools were slower than molasses. I was miserable enough doing it that I rejected multiple flex jobs that came my way.

When adobe eventally pause to ponder the Doom hanging over the flash ecosystem, they will realize that it was Flex that killed it.

Nope, it was the Flash runtime. That, and the fate of being a plugin that provides functionality that the browsers would eventually make part of the core rendering engines.

Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer

#73

Post by GlennS »

phillco wrote: post #18

For me, web development seems like the exact opposite of desktop development. In desktop development, you learn the underlying foundations first (the programming language, files, networking, graphics, GUIs, etc), then weave them together to build your application. It's slow, but worth it -- often the concepts are universal. How many times do you have to re-learn file IO? In web development, it's really easy to build…

I too find web development annoying for this reason - everything feels so arbitrary. Rather than learning a set of principles you're learning a huge bag of tricks.

The result is that when I forget something, I can't go back and figure it out from something simpler. It also makes it really hard to build abstractions that actually work.

Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer

#74

Post by rhizome »

masklinn wrote: post #54
phillco wrote: post #18

For me, web development seems like the exact opposite of desktop development. In desktop development, you learn the underlying foundations first (the programming language, files, networking, graphics, GUIs, etc), then weave them together to build your application. It's slow, but worth it -- often the concepts are universal. How many times do you have to re-learn file IO? In web development, it's really easy to build…

> How many times do you have to re-learn file IO? Dunno. Bytes IO or text IO? evented IO? Lazy IO? Monadic IO? Which platform are you on? Will there be concurrent access? Is your file always a file or is it also a socket? Yeah, you re-learn file IO quite a bit I'd say. And that's without talking about APIs going from straightforward (and broken) to completely baroque (and still broken). Oh sure, sometimes > it's real…

I don't know from Monadic I/O, but at least a couple of those might appear to the untrained eye to be application I/O rather than actual file I/O, which I would guess has been pretty uniformly oriented around the open(3) idiom by now.

Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer

#75

Post by AgentConundrum »

pavpanchekha wrote: post #34

Stop conflating your non-understanding of something with inherent difficulty. You might find the code (defmacro unless (cond &body res) `(if (not ,cond) ,@rest)) rather opaque; but it's actually pretty darn simple. You might find body { width: 800px; position: relative; left: 50%; margin-left: -400px; } impossible to pull out of one's ass; it's not, you're just unused to negative margins. To you, TeX macros or M4 or…

I'm inclined to agree. I read the whole post, and found myself sort of agreeing with it, since I have been bitten by random browser specific (and not just IE!) quirks, and I can sort of understand having difficulty getting to know JavaScript if you're not used to it. Then I got to this line:

> Take a look at the CSS in step 2 of the Lightbox example. Are you kidding me? There’s no way in hell any of that follows logically.

And the other shoe dropped. I took a look at the example step referenced, and it was all very straightforward to me. I realize that this was because I'm already familiar with CSS, but I can't imagine it would take a motivated learner more than a couple minutes to learn what was going on in the code listed.

Programming in general is about always learning new things. The industry is always evolving and if you get complacent, you'll get left behind. This shouldn't be news to anyone, but if your reaction to hearing it for the first time is "that's too hard, I don't want to do that", then maybe you should go work on your carpentry skills.

Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer

#76

Post by Dinoguy1000 »

jahewson wrote: post #65
sahillavingia wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is more to it than just that. For example you can have a class and an id for a div. The id attributes will overwrite the class ones. And some other fun rules too!

That's inheritance.

No, that's specificity (an entirely different beast, and one that can be considerably harder to work with). Inheritance would be styles for a P tag applying to a child I tag.

Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer

#77

Post by jarek »

DougBTX wrote: post #67
jarek wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negative margin as used in pavpanchekha's example centers the box also in browsers that do not support margin:auto. It's not complex if you know why it's done that way.

The latest browser which doesn't support margin:auto is IE5.5, and even there the text-align:center hack is a better option. There are cases where you might want to use negative margins, but for horizontally centering block level elements, it is at best outdated.

Unless you use a strict doctype. http://stever.ca/web-design/centering-a-div-in-ie8-using-mar... I don't think text-align: center on the parent box is significantly different in principle: confusing until you know why it's being done that why and roughly how it works.

Personally I like negative margin better than text-align: center since the style is only applied to the box being centered rather than the parent box and the box itself, but surely this is a matter of preference or the design of the particular page in question.

Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer

#78

Post by Iv »

tikhonj wrote: post #32
runn1ng wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I argued with one of my friends about exactly this point. He said that web development is great, that the HTML is semantics, CSS is style, javascript is everything active, everything neatly in their own files. What I said is - look at ANY of top100 Alexa websites and show me ONE where style, semantics and action is not mangled together in one big chaos, where HTML is just semantics and not DIVs put inside each other…

I suspect that is at least partly because of heavy performance optimization. Unfortunately, even the cleverest of abstractions tend to break or at least bend when you have to optimize something very heavily.

Because we all now that no display is as optimized as an html div box... They are currently using crazy optimization techniques in browsers to make javascript-heavy pages have the level of badly-designed native apps.

Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer

#79

Post by Iv »

rimantas wrote: post #41
Iv wrote: post #17

Actually, this criticism is true when you use HTML for what it was not intended to do : Make pretty renderings. The core functionality of HTML is to provide hyperlinked data. It does that concisely and efficiently. CSS and DIVs are a mere kludge added on top of a language that is supposed to transmit mainly semantical data. I really wish xhtml would have won in place of HTML/CSS. This kind of things would have been f…

> I really wish xhtml would have won in place of HTML/CSS. This makes me doubt that you understand what you are talking about. XHTML and HTML have exactly the same semantics. CSS has little to do with them (you can use CSS to style you XML documents if you wish so). With CSS3 and modern browsers you can pretty much avoid anything to HTML just for styling purposes. Heck, take a look at http://camendesign.com/ It's not…

The idea was that xhtml was supposed to work hand in hand with XSLT. Instead of HTML/CSS you would have XHTML/XSLT. You would process XML files with a turing-complete language to display nice styles. Every web site would be directly machine-readable. RSS would be completemy useless as they would be easy to extract from the raw XML.

Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer

#80

Post by tretiy3 »

artursapek wrote: post #25

I honestly find it easier to build UI elements from the ground up over using plug-ins, because like with any other code if you are the one who developed it you understand it . I too have been turned off by lightbox and slider plugins for jQuery, and find it easier to just come up with that kind of thing myself rather than jump into someone else's codebase.

I hate plugins also. Actually someone will save megs of traffic and seconds of computation doing ones own lightboxes and sliders. Any kind of them.
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