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Show HN: HTML for People

htmlforpeople.com

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Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#211

Post by sova »

krapp wrote: post #195
sova wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IF it is not a challenge to invent new glyphs and manufacture new keys, then perhaps we can rethink the markup as well. It is a rather open-ended question and I appreciate your asking. I have some thoughts, mainly inspired by the original inspiration to things like cascading styles, which was an inheritance of concepts and a jumble loosely associated with how magazines are structured and arranged / composed on a series of pages that flip together and have images and text. It seems that there are, by now, largely, conventions that are stuck to in the online realm, so maybe there is an amazing shorthand we could develop to get the same point across, now. What we are discussing is becoming closer and closer a reality because the amount of code pressing TAB will output (autocomplete) is increasing, and evening time and sunset time on actual "coding" might happen in our lifetimes. Perhaps not for microprocessors on solo devices requiring direct register access and pointer circuiting, but the trend is that less or fewer keystrokes can produce just as rich content. The markup language makes it "hypertext," right?

꜐expandꜘourꜛglyph꜅workꜝ Wikipedia has something closer to what I envision as what the dudes who done did CSS done thought. Someothing closer to arranging your magazine on the page for others to surf, and also link it with other pages. The soothing letters of English and their stradivarian font-signatures so carefully plucked and delicately labored on in the ethers of Apple headquarters, are bruised and battered by slashing and elbowing />

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#212

Post by efreak »

badsectoracula wrote: post #191
sureIy wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> Classic example would be the "Computer" (or "My Computer") in Windows which is a folder but not a directory

This sounds backwards to me, going by the real life counterparts for these terms. A directory is a list of pointers to items located anywhere (eg. a phone directory for a business may contain corporate and other remote numbers alongside local extensions), but a folder contains actual files that are physically located inside it; you can put references to remote items inside, but only by placing a physical representation/reference inside of it.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#213

Post by runeks »

egypturnash wrote: post #206
egypturnash wrote: post #156

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.”

I’m getting downvoted for this question but I think that is a pretty important thing to be getting out of the way in a book for someone who might not know what the heck HTML is, and why they might want to learn it!

I disagree. People reading a book on how to write HTML already have an idea of what it is — why else would they read the book?

And, in any case, explaining what HTML stands for does not get anyone closer to understanding what it is.

I think it's a feature that this book doesn't throw technical jargon at the reader before they've even created anything useful yet.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#214

Post by psnehanshu »

IIsi50MHz wrote: post #163
psnehanshu wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on! Google Photos is not confusing at all. It is very clear on what it does, but I may be biased.

Try enabling Google Photos to automatically upload images from multiple devices to the same account. If Google Photos is low on space, try deleting from Google Photos without causing it to delete from all other devices. Seems to require manually copying all those files to an untracked folder, then deleting from Google Photos. Try managing which folders Google Photos syncs: When it asks to add a newly found folder, th…

I take photos on my phone, and they are automatically backed up. I can access them on all my devices, and I have them even when I change my primary phone, so I am happy. I only backup my camera photos, so I guess my needs are simple. So it suits my needs. I can disable it from backing up any other folders, so random photos don't end up in my library. I never needed to find out where a photo was backed up from, because I only care about my camera photos.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#215

Post by saghm »

_lvbh wrote: post #12
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 crazy how bad the mobile epidemic has gotten. There are kids coming into a Computer Science degree that can't figure out how to unzip a zip or even finding out where files get downloaded to. (Fwiw, those I know dropped out before 2nd year)

As frustrating as I imagine it is to be in the position of having to figure out how to teach students things that seem like basics they should be aware of, I'd also argue that this issue actually stems from two circumstances that are worth this cost: the filesystem abstraction is increasingly unnecessary for non-technical people, and incoming students who want to study computer science aren't required to already have technical knowledge beyond that of their non-CS peers. The alternatives to where we're currently at would be either regressing the usability of interfaces for the overwhelming majority of people or taking away access to computer science education to people who didn't or couldn't go out of their way to learn topics that only matter to technical people in advance.

The growing irrelevance of the filesystem for the average computer user isn't a ln "epidemic" any more than the obsolescence of the CLI for the average person; it's just additional progress towards adapting computers to be more human-friendly rather than the reverse. We didn't used to have cars with automatic transmissions, cruise control, or blinkers that turned off on their own once you've finished turning, and no one describes the evolution evolution of the way we drove cars from decades ago to the present in the same language as a public health emergency.

Over time, technology becoming simpler to use by parts of the interface getting pushed down into implementation details is a good thing for the vast majority of people in the long run, and it's important for those of us who are technical not to mistake the requirement of a certain feature for the ability to access it. I think the biggest concern with the dominance mobile computing isn't that users might not need to know about the filesystem but that users might not have control of their own devices in the long run if the ability to access the filesystem is removed. There's precedent in getting support from the non-technical public to care about technical details when they understand how it affects them (e.g. right to repair, the pushback against SOPA/PIPA, net neutrality), but I that we'll miss the window to influence things similarly here if we focus on the wrong thing.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#216

Post by brunoarueira »

The concept is great, my father, which is a doctor, bought a minibook at a newsstand about HTML for dummies. At the time (maybe 98 upto 2000) explaining the good old markee, blink and other tags besides the basic HTML document composition. So, I think learn HTML is for everyone!

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#217

Post by zahlman »

ordu wrote: post #66
_lvbh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy how bad the mobile epidemic has gotten. There are kids coming into a Computer Science degree that can't figure out how to unzip a zip or even finding out where files get downloaded to. (Fwiw, those I know dropped out before 2nd year)

> can't figure out how to unzip a zip or even finding out where files get downloaded to. I have issues with that. FF doesn't show the path in the list of downloads. There is a button to start a file manager, but I have no file managers installed, so button doesn't work. In some cases I didn't find the better way than to copy the link and to download again with wget.

Click the folder icon on the right-hand side of the entry in the download list (it should have "Show in Folder" hover text). If the file is still in the place where Firefox originally saved it, Firefox will instruct your file browser (Explorer on Windows; whatever else on Linux - for me, it's Nemo) to open a window for the containing folder. Otherwise it will add "File moved or missing" text to the entry.

Re: Show HN: HTML for People

#218

Post by chrisldgk »

An absolutely great tutorial and something I wish I had when I first started playing around with HTML about 11 years ago (I’m 26, quite late to the party).

Even though I’ve been working as a full-stack for quite a few years now I’ve been hooked while reading just imagining and remembering how magical building my first few websites used to be. I’m hoping this will get some more people to realize how easy it is to build your own webpage and how much fun it can be building your own little place on the internet.

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