Mozilla Thimble

#1

Post by pathdependent » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 4:26 PM UTC

Re: Mozilla Thimble

#2

Post by yawgmoth » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 5:09 PM UTC

This looks like a fantastic tool to use for introduction to front end development. The inline tool tips / tag definitions are very useful if you aren't sure what a particular tag does.

Re: Mozilla Thimble

#3

Post by dudus » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 5:10 PM UTC

It seems to me more like a jsbin.com/jsfiddle.com clone than a real Web IDE.

The editor is helpful though, specially for novices. The syntax highlight is very different from what you're used to. Although I find it a little too much intrusive it makes it very easy to spot small typos.

Re: Mozilla Thimble

#4

Post by jashkenas » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 5:12 PM UTC

Neat -- poking around in the console, it looks like Webmaker is using Backbone.js ... I was wondering if anyone from the Webmaker team could tell us what exactly it's using it for?

Re: Mozilla Thimble

#5

Post by vibrunazo » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 5:12 PM UTC

This feels like they're a bit confused about which target audience and abstraction layer they're aiming to. This is like trying to get more kids to program by trying to show them how easy and fun assembly language is. Shouldn't your energy be better spent developing, promoting and educating the use of higher level tools? It's hard for me to think of an use case for this. What kind of people, exactly would this help?

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for teaching more people to code. More importantly, getting more people to build stuff. But trying to teach newcomers to something historically bloated like HTML, sounds discouraging. Many others said before, HTML, CSS, JavaScript are pretty much the Machine Language of the web. It made sense for us to learn those first when it was all we had. But moved forward, it seems more intelligent to get more people to build stuff by having them use higher abstraction layers first. Even more, try to develop even higher layers that'll enable even more people to contribute.

I love Mozilla and I love the initiative. But I don't honestly think this will help much.

Re: Mozilla Thimble

#6

Post by ChrisArchitect » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 5:12 PM UTC

looking for reasons to use this. Other than educational purposes? And where are the pages hosted? This is basically for one off displays of random content?

Re: Mozilla Thimble

#7

Post by the-come-ons » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 5:15 PM UTC

I literally shudder at the thought of editing code from within a browser. That said, it does seem useful for introducing html.

Re: Mozilla Thimble

#8

Post by alexkam » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 5:17 PM UTC

Looks like javascript is not allowed here. If so - what is the purpose of all this? Does anyone still make pages which have zero javascript?

But the html editor is a really nice one :-)

Re: Mozilla Thimble

#9

Post by AhtiK » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 5:23 PM UTC

> Thimble makes it ridiculously simple to create your own web pages.

Ridiculously simple way would be to edit straight inside the page.

Why contentEditable-based in-place editing is still missing in so many blog and website engines?

Navigating between html editor and preview feels a bit wrong and old when targeting regular users.

I'm not saying that only Thimble is the "old and wrong". I've been wondering about the same issue also with wordpress, drupal, joomla etc.

Re: Mozilla Thimble

#10

Post by ChrisLTD » Mon, Jun 18, 2012, 5:24 PM UTC

vibrunazo wrote: post #5

This feels like they're a bit confused about which target audience and abstraction layer they're aiming to. This is like trying to get more kids to program by trying to show them how easy and fun assembly language is. Shouldn't your energy be better spent developing, promoting and educating the use of higher level tools? It's hard for me to think of an use case for this. What kind of people, exactly would this help?…

Plain old HTML is a fundamental building block of the web. It was designed to be, and still succeeds in being, a simple to learn tool to create documents for consumption by web browsers.

Sure, it has added complexity over the years, but you don't need to know every tag & attribute or CSS & Javascript to get started and see results immediately.