Live data from Hacker News

My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website

naya.lol

61–70 of 547 posts

Re: My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, call them byte streams or blobs, that's fine too. I'm not disagreeing, but the point I wanted to make was that recently, people seem to have gotten the idea that their objects are semi-magical things locked into some app or some cloud service. Which is fine by the SaaS providers, or course. But it doesn't really foster understanding of the world around you. Like kids thinking corn comes from the corn factory.

When I was a kid I used to think that pasta came from a pasta factory.

When we were children we were taught about the spaghetti harvest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU

Re: My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website

#63
post #26

Width and height must be specified without units (although looks like browsers accept it, probably by ignoring the unit). IMG tags are self-closing, so you can omit The dog picture has wrong aspect ratio. The dog is squeezed! It should be 620 × 349 or, if 500 width or 400 height is needed, there's a good mathematical task to calculate the size of the other side. No need for / in HTML. unicorn.html unicorncopy.html Pa…

> No need for / in HTML I personally prefer having the /> even though it's not necessary, so that I can tell at-a-glance whether a tag is self-closing or not. It doesn't hurt, does it? (plus I'm just used to it because the book I learned HTML from was confident that XHTML was the future)

I strongly believe that the harm we experienced from XHTML should not be passed down to future generations.

Re: My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, call them byte streams or blobs, that's fine too. I'm not disagreeing, but the point I wanted to make was that recently, people seem to have gotten the idea that their objects are semi-magical things locked into some app or some cloud service. Which is fine by the SaaS providers, or course. But it doesn't really foster understanding of the world around you. Like kids thinking corn comes from the corn factory.

When I was a kid I used to think that pasta came from a pasta factory.

Hah, so young and foolish. Everyone knows pasta grows on trees: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8scpGwbvxvI

Re: My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website

#65
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Files are an abstraction that was very useful in the last several decades, but that just isn't as relevant in the current world. Those videos and documents you mentioned are likely managed via object storage in a distributed database, itself possibly using block storage directly, with no actual "file" in an old-school filesystem anywhere in sight. I still personally cling to files personally, but I have no real reaso…

Until you try creating one of those videos, and now you need .movs and .mp3s and .pngs and a place to store the render output. Files have a way to go yet.

Also, replying to myself, have you ever had a job? At a place? Where the primary function isn't coding?

Files are everywhere. They are every-thing. Except now, thanks to the disaster that is SharePoint, nobody has a fucking idea where they are any more. Because they've been abstracted away by some genius on the Teams team.

So nobody can find what they were just working on. Or they have no idea if the thing they find is the right version. It's a total shambles.

A hierarchical file system was boring, but it worked. And it still does.

Disclosure: I'm Johnny.Decimal and my business depends on files still being a thing.

Re: My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website

#67
Recently I see more and more articles and social media posts surprised about the current youth’s lack of a mental model how computers actually work. I assume this is due to smartphones and tablets not letting them experiment. Laptop hardware is also usually not made to tinker with.

OP, I think you’re doing your daughter a great service with building an attitude that computers are just machines that can be learned about and understood. I started with HTML at 10 years old, and it gave me a lasting passion about the internet and connecting the world, leading to peace among distant people. Nowadays as an adult I’m unfortunately disillusioned due to negative aspects of social media, dating apps, and fake news, but alas..

Maybe in the future you can show her light javascript, the WAMP stack to make a guestbook (beware of spam nowadays), a cat image gallery with upload function (and a password). The latter features requiring something like PHP or perhaps python nowadays, and some database (I used mysql 25 years ago, perhaps sqlite or postgres nowadays?)

Re: My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website

#68
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Files are an abstraction that was very useful in the last several decades, but that just isn't as relevant in the current world. Those videos and documents you mentioned are likely managed via object storage in a distributed database, itself possibly using block storage directly, with no actual "file" in an old-school filesystem anywhere in sight. I still personally cling to files personally, but I have no real reaso…

Until you try creating one of those videos, and now you need .movs and .mp3s and .pngs and a place to store the render output. Files have a way to go yet.

You’d be surprised! With many apps on the iPhone you can get by

Edit a video? Built in app, or your social media app is already loaded with that and you can save state instead of posting

Reverse a video? There’s an app for that which just goes back into your Photos app to let you tried that content

and so on

people dont need to have that mental model until something breaks

Re: My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website

#69
post #29

Exactly as I would do it if I were a 7yo. Speak what you will about the virtues of CSS and semantic markup, these things get in the way of having fun. And can be learned later.

Totally agree with you. Not a front end dev myself, and I have multiple variations of "how do i center a div" in my search history, haha. With varying degrees of angry expletives added to the query.

Kids these days don’t know how easy they have it with flexbox!
Post reply on HN