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Show HN: HTML for People

htmlforpeople.com

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Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#191

Post by badsectoracula »

sureIy wrote: post #175
rapind wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> apparently a large number of people these days don't understand files and folders at all! And here I am shaking my fist insisting these are “directories” not “folders”… ;)

Other than "directory came first", what's the reason why something is a "directory but not a folder"?

The distinction probably came from Macintosh though it was more pronounced in Windows 95 - also it is the other way around: something can be a folder but not a directory. Classic example would be the "Computer" (or "My Computer") in Windows which is a folder but not a directory. The Windows Shell maintains some sort of VFS that exposes these.

Generally a folder is a directory-like thing that groups file-like things but not necessarily mapped to real on-disk directories and files - and more often than not, it is exposed via GUIs rather than command line applications. Of course that is just common use not anything inherent - after all on Linux it is common to expose stuff via the filesystem (sometimes in addition to VFSs) that still uses the terms directories instead of folders with the only difference for when one is used or the other to be if it is done via a command line application or a GUI application.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#192

Post by unethical_ban »

dartharva wrote: post #72
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…

It's weird seeing this getting emphasized over and again in this thread. > There are a shockingly large number of people out there that use computers EVERY day that won't know how to do this. That's very hard to believe. Even my mom, who doesn't use computers at all, would know what folders and files mean. The people who don't know what files and folders are - can't immediately be beneficiaries of this guide, right?…

My dad worked at NASA and built circuit boards that are currently in space.

He got confused a few years ago because "how can you have a folder inside a folder? Only files get put in folders".

Of course, he would not read this book.

If someone can't figure out how to make a folder but wants to write HTML, they have a problem this book should t be obligated to solve.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#193

Post by sova »

krapp wrote: post #166
sova wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think something that starts with "less than exclamation point" is made for people? "less than exclamation point minus minus" ah yes it just rolls off the tongue. HTML was clearly designed to add "semantic web" to the existing text data of the internet, no matter the cost to human readability. If it's "made for people" it's only in the roundabout fashion that eventually it gets hidden away by the interface to chan…

Human beings are capable of dealing with abstract forms of expression other than natural language. Musicians deal with music notation. Stenographers write in shorthand. Mathematical notation. No programming language with its brackets and parentheses "rolls off the tongue" either but human beings nevertheless write code. HTML is just one such abstraction, concerned with adding markup and hyperlinks to a digital simula…

All I'm saying is that if you were to make a semantic markup of English today, would you really want to use keyboard-convenient glyphs just because it's hardware-convenient?

What would be the best way to add markup to English? It seems like an unexplored question. And if we were to explore it, we would find many alternatives, ranking much higher on the "for people" scale than HTML.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#194

Post by jamiedumont »

This is a brilliant endeavour and incredibly well executed! I’ll certainly be bookmarking it to share with others.

I’ve recently decided to start adding to my website with just hand-written HTML, and slowly migrating the back catalogue. I love its directness, its ability for ad-hoc changes to a page and its robustness. After trying almost every system for publishing on the web under the sun; I’ve concluded HTML is the right tool for the job, even if it means a little extra work up front.

As a retired developer I’m happy to tinker with Rust or SQL or something embedded when the mood strikes, but when I want to write, I just want to write - and HTML kind of lets me do that. I think if more people saw HTML as a document to author rather than just a build target then we’d have a lot simpler systems. This mindset has resulted/allowed for a huge dumbing down of average computer/web users and huge headaches for developers. I can’t think who all the complexity we’ve brought into the world serves 99% of the time.

This resource might be one of the things that nudges us back on track.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#195

Post by krapp »

sova wrote: post #193
krapp wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human beings are capable of dealing with abstract forms of expression other than natural language. Musicians deal with music notation. Stenographers write in shorthand. Mathematical notation. No programming language with its brackets and parentheses "rolls off the tongue" either but human beings nevertheless write code. HTML is just one such abstraction, concerned with adding markup and hyperlinks to a digital simula…

All I'm saying is that if you were to make a semantic markup of English today, would you really want to use keyboard-convenient glyphs just because it's hardware-convenient? What would be the best way to add markup to English? It seems like an unexplored question. And if we were to explore it, we would find many alternatives, ranking much higher on the "for people" scale than HTML.

>All I'm saying is that if you were to make a semantic markup of English today, would you really want to use keyboard-convenient glyphs just because it's hardware-convenient?

HTML is not a semantic markup of English, it's a semantic markup of digital text documents. Yes, you would want to use keyboard-convenient glyphs to express this markup because the keyboard is the primary means by which a human inputs text into a computer, which itself is the primary means by which HTML documents are viewed. Also because HTML operates primarily within the context of typography, in other words, because the data that HTML marks up also consists of keyboard convenient glyphs. It only makes sense to use text glyphs to describe the transformation of text glyphs within the context of a textual medium of communication.

Even Markdown is essentially the same thing. There's little real difference between surrounding a word in asterisks versus or tags to denote bold text, other than aesthetics.

>And if we were to explore it, we would find many alternatives, ranking much higher on the "for people" scale than HTML.

Like what? Interpretive dance? Arcane gestures? Singing the markup into being?

People have been using written language for thousands of years, representing written language with type for centuries, and using keyboards as an interface for generating text since long before computers were invented. It all seems to work just fine for many people. I'm curious what you think would be better.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#196

Post by Theodores »

blakewatson wrote: post #38
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…

OP here. I appreciate the kind words. Yeah, I hope it finds its way into the hands of non-professionals.

::backdrop was useful to me. Right now I am learning the last two years of stuff, refreshing my frontend skills. Things like scoping are a dream come true.

I haven't got all the way through it, but seeing the contents drop-down made me feel at home.

I put document structure first so the content looks good with no styling and no class attributes. I use no divs, just the more sensible elements. Sections, Articles, Asides and Navs work for me. There should be headings at the start of these elements, optionally in a Header and optionally ending with a Footer. The main structure is Header - Main - Footer.

Really there should be a need to keep it simple, and that begins with the document structure. It is then possible with scoping to style the elements within a block without having to use any classes except for at the top of a block.

It infuriates me that we have gone the other way to make everything more and more complex. We have turned something everyone should be able to work with into an outsourced cottage industry. Nowadays the tool chain needed for frontend development is stupid and a true barrier to entry. Whenever you look under the hood there is nothing but bloat.

My approach requires strict adherence to a document structure, however, my HTML content is fully human readable and the content looks great without a stylesheet, albeit HTML 1.0 pre-Netscape looking.

Tim Berners Lee did not have class attributes in HTML 1.0 but he did want content sectioning. Now that there is CSS grid it is easy to style up a structured document. However, 'sea of divs' HTML requires 'display: contents' to massage the simplest of form to fit into a grid.

I feel that a guide is needed for experienced frontend developers that are still churning out 'sea of div' content. In the Mozilla guide for 'div' it says that it is the element of last resort. I never need the 'div' because there is always something better.

The CSS compilers are also redundant when working with scoping and structured content. Sadly my IDE is out of date so I have to put the scoping in at the end as it does not recognise @scope. Time to upgrade...

Anyway, brilliant guide, in the right direction and of great interest to me and my peculiar way of writing super neat content and styling.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#197

Post by card_zero »

al_borland wrote: post #62
stego-tech wrote: post #14

We sorely need more of this. HTML was the first language I actually understood (although BASIC was my first ever), and left me feeling empowered to carve out my own survival on the internet. While layering CSS and Javascript aren't bad decisions on their face, I do think they combine to create a steep barrier to entry for most newcomers as they're believed to be "Core" to the language of HTML itself. Kudos to the aut…

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…

Party like it's 1999:

  
  
  My First Heading
https://werbach.com/barebones/barebones.html

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#198

Post by radlad »

skydhash wrote: post #189
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?

That’s the easiest thing to get ahold of. You can find them for cheap on ebay.

When I was a kid, this wasn't something I could afford or that my parents were willing to pay for. I did oftentimes use the library computers, but they were locked down (of course, half the fun was finding ways around that.)

I was very lucky that my middle school (in a fairly low-income area) was given a grant by NASA that allowed them to supply all of us with laptops during the school year. I surely wouldn't be where I am today without it.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#199

Post by RheingoldRiver »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #162
RheingoldRiver wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not about knowing the basics of using a computer, it's about eliminating the possibility of tiny mistakes like 1 typo in a file name causing everything to break, which can put someone off coding forever

> tiny mistakes like 1 typo in a file name causing everything to break, which can put someone off coding forever One typo in your math or chemistry homework will quite likely give you the wrong final answer, but hopefully that wouldn't "put you off science" forever. Otherwise none of us would be here as I'm sure we have all made hundreds or more. Are we not expecting students to be resilient and solve problems anymor…

The important context here is that this book is not "HTML for programmers," it's "HTML for people who are probably pretty damn scared about the word HTML right now"

In this case, the single most important thing is *early successes*. Kids spend years learning about the number line and what is the difference between + and - before they ever do 2+2=4. Or if they learn 2+2=4 first, it's just some abstract syllables they were taught to parrot, and they probably don't understand.

For a new programmer, who is ALREADY SCARED OF PROGRAMMING, the single most important thing is early successes. If they can make something work on their first attempt, without realtime help from a friend fixing their mistakes, they are SO much more likely to have the needed self-confidence to keep learning.

For a concrete example, every time I teach regular expressions to people I say, `cat` is a regular expression! Let's search for `cat` in `catastrophe` and turn "regex" mode on! Congrats, you have now written and used your first ever regex!! And this goes over SO well. It's SO much better than trying to start out with a symbol, because I give them an initial win that they achieved and that they were able to do. And if they get stuck later, they can always go back to knowing that `cat` is a regular expression and search for `cat` in `catastrophe`. And if it doesn't work, there's a different problem.

In other words, not only is giving people an early success like this good motivation, it's also teaching them the negative control that they'll use for the rest of their programming careers, even if they don't know it.

"Make a file on your computer" is not useful by itself. It's not a negative control. It's not an early success. It can be learned later, once you have the other things.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#200

Post by radlad »

chronogram wrote: post #98
necovek wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hacking at computers for almost 30 years, and I cannot figure out where a file gets downloaded to on a mobile (Android) phone.

That sounds really difficult for you. It's just a "Download" folder on my device, just like in most operating systems since the '00s.

Mm, that's not exactly true. Having done a bit of Android development, these days you're rarely operating on a "home directory" structure like you might be familiar with from Windows, Linux, etc. Instead you're saving files to a "container" filesystem that's exposed to the user in a few facets: Downloads, Photos, Music, etc.

What's even more confusing is that some apps save images directly to the "Gallery" which is separate from the "file and folder" view you get otherwise. So (as an inaccurate example), Fujifilm's app might download directly to your "Camera Roll" while GoPro's app might create a "GoPro" directory to dump photos/videos in, which offers more separation but doesn't appear in the "Photos" app by default.

Some apps even have toggles to switch between these two methods of saving files - though if I recall correctly, the non-Gallery/Camera Roll method (while desirable to many users) of saving images has technically been deprecated for a while.

You can read more here: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage

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