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Show HN: HTML for People

htmlforpeople.com

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Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#151

Post by II2II »

mr_toad wrote: post #144
bo1024 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure they have a computer (i.e. something with a keyboard and a filesystem that it is possible to write and run programs on) at home?

Computers existed before keyboards and filesystems, and likely they will continue to exist after both are obsolete.

In some respects, a modern mobile phone has more in common with minicomputers than minicomputers had with computers before keyboards and file systems. Being able to interact with computers in a meaningful way transformed computers from programmable calculators and data processing machines into something entirely different. I would imagine that more people have seen those archaic computers in museums than during their service life simply because there was no need to interact with those computers back in the day. Even a web developer has more direct control over a server in a data centre than most early programmers had over early computers. (At least those used in businesses. Computers used for research were a different story.)

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#152

Post by al_borland »

bob1029 wrote: post #120
al_borland wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think CSS and JS should be things the user graduates to when they decide they need them, if they ever do. Show someone basic HTML and most people will eventually look at their page and think, “this is neat, but how to I make this title red and change the background?” This is when to introduce the very basics of CSS. If someone has a goal the learning process is easier and more exciting, because it’s relevant and al…

I think teaching all 3 at once is better. You can take a really simple vertical slice to demonstrate how they interact to compose the DOM. Then, spend the next 2 weeks inside dev tools explaining how to navigate the DOM and browser state. Establishing mapping between dev tools and the examples is where self sufficiency becomes feasible. I agree you can pretty much get there with plain HTML academically and in concept…

If we are talking about non-technical people simply making documents for the web, I don’t think they ever really need to know what the DOM, dev tools, or state is. They’ll never really run into that, as the sites will be rather trivial, and that’s ok.

For someone looking to be a web developer, I can see where some would need a faster ramp up to hold their interest, but they should also still know that it can be this simple. I saw a video not long ago where someone asked a bunch of people who just finished a web dev bootcamp to make a basic HTML file and put it on the web, much like what this tutorial does in the first couple steps. Most of them couldn’t do it. If someone can make a page using React, but can’t make a simple HTML page, I think that’s a problem. It leads to a lot of overly complex solutions, because they were never taught how simple it can really be.

Even for technical folks, their area of expertise may fall outside of the web, but they still want a web page to share information. The basics are perfect and often used. Dennis Ritchie’s page was a perfect example of that. A lot of people from this era have similar sites.

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#153

Post by IshKebab »

lemonberry wrote: post #149

This is great, but most people don't care about coding or building their websites for scratch. Most people don't work on their own cars. Authors don't bind their own books. People want to share their thoughts, stories, and photos. In my opinion, we need better tools to allow people to create their own sites without needing to code.

Yeah I agree that is true for most people, but there are also people who do want to code their own website from scratch, and for them this is a really good introduction.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#154

Post by IshKebab »

otteromkram wrote: post #22
mightybyte wrote: post #7

I think the fundamental approach being taken by this project is immensely valuable to the world. This kind of education about open standards might actually be the most powerful tool that can help us take steps in the direction away from giant opaque corporations and back towards the systems based on open standards that the internet originated from. I really hope this project continues to be updated and get more and m…

Mozilla has amazing documentation that's been around for years. Here's their basic html tutorial section: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML No one is or has been stopping people from learning HTML.

HTML for People is waaaay more approachable than this. My wife could follow the HTML for People tutorial. It shows you how to create a real web page in a real browser without first bogging you down in coding details.

The MDN tutorial is talking about img alt attributes before you even create a single .html file! That's how to put people off.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#155

Post by IshKebab »

Retr0id wrote: post #18
forbiddenvoid wrote: post #13

I love the idea and I'm thrilled to see more sites like this out there. But I do think this assumes a level of computer literacy that isn't consistent with typical, non-technical users. Step 1 starts with: > Pick a location on your computer and create a folder. Call it my-site or something similar. You've already lost the vast majority of people right here. There are a shockingly large number of people out there that…

I suspect even a majority of HN users visited the page on a mobile device, and were not in a position to immediately follow the instructions.

So? How many people are editing HTML on their phones?

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#156

Post by egypturnash »

Is HTML ever actually defined in the beginning of this book? There’s a reference to what the acronym expands to when tags start getting introduced but the chapters before this never come out and say “HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, and here are three sentences that very briefly explain what that means; we’ll be exploring that in much more detain in the coming chapters.”

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#157

Post by graemep »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #148
simonw wrote: post #8

This is great. The decision to skip CSS by depending on https://simplecss.org/ is smart - CSS is a whole other thing, and having that on top of basic HTML would be pretty intimidating. I did worry a bit about https://htmlforpeople.com/zero-to-internet-your-first-websit... - "Step 1. Create a folder on your computer" - because apparently a large number of people these days don't understand files and folders at all! ht…

It's not a problem, consumers won't even edit a wiki, that's just what consumers are.

As someone who is involved in a community run wiki, people will say "that page is wrong" and when you say "please edit it" will say "its too hard" or "I do not have they time".

They will, however, write a long Facebook comment explaining what is wrong and explaining that they cannot edit a wiki.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#158

Post by voxic11 »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #113
jraph wrote: post #107

Well done! I really like how you make people write bare text, publish it and bam, that works, just like this, and how you ease into html. The text is very well written, straightforward, welcoming, well structured. It seems easy and enjoyable to read. I believe that putting html in non professional hands is a good goal. Some feedback: - About , it seems to be introduced quite late. People comfortable with English but…

> People comfortable with English but wanting to write their website in their own language might be surprised. A main complication here is that people don't even know about character encodings, so you can't reasonably expect them to save index.html in UTF-8 in the first place. (For example Windows notepad would use the active code page by default.) I agree that it should be featured prominently if that saving issue c…

As of Windows 10 1903 the default encoding for Notepad is UTF-8. I think its reasonable to expect relatively modern systems to default text to UTF-8.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#159

Post by chrisfinazzo »

asoneth wrote: post #21
simonw wrote: post #8

This is great. The decision to skip CSS by depending on https://simplecss.org/ is smart - CSS is a whole other thing, and having that on top of basic HTML would be pretty intimidating. I did worry a bit about https://htmlforpeople.com/zero-to-internet-your-first-websit... - "Step 1. Create a folder on your computer" - because apparently a large number of people these days don't understand files and folders at all! ht…

> The decision to skip CSS by depending on https://simplecss.org/ is smart I was always a little disappointed with how most web browsers choose to render HTML pages that had no explicit styling information. I'm not necessarily saying web browsers should have defaults as opinionated as simple.css, but the default page margins, padding, text styles, headings, etc that they picked aren't particularly attractive. Opinion…

There's a reason why the CSS ["reset"][1] is still with us - the lower level user-agent stylesheet never really adopted any of this stuff. Presumably, this was to reduce the delta between browser engines (vendor prefixes, etc, etc.) but it would be nice to see some movement in this area.

[1]: https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

As you point out, people who care will use some of the defaults and override others as they go along, but a small bit of effort goes a long way:

    html, body {
      margin: 0;
      padding: 0;
    }

    body {
      line-height: 1.6;
      -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
    }

    img, picture, video, canvas, svg {
      display: block;
      max-width: 100%;
    }

    input, button, textarea, select {
      font: inherit;
    }

    p, h1, h2, h3 {
      overflow-wrap: break-word;
    }

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#160

Post by morpheuskafka »

jraph wrote: post #107

Well done! I really like how you make people write bare text, publish it and bam, that works, just like this, and how you ease into html. The text is very well written, straightforward, welcoming, well structured. It seems easy and enjoyable to read. I believe that putting html in non professional hands is a good goal. Some feedback: - About , it seems to be introduced quite late. People comfortable with English but…

Don't you actually need to set something in the text editor to save it as UTF-8 in the first place if you are going to put that tag? Wouldn't Notepad for example use UTF-16 by default like the rest of Windows?
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