Breathtakingly simplistic. And wrong. That’s like saying because someone can show you the rules of chess in ten minutes, you can be playing in that time.
Just learning the basic set of markup codes and how they interact in anything beyond the very simplest linear code snippet can take quite a bit of “learning.”
That you go from “this is too simple for you to worry about ‘learning’” to brief passes at CSS and JS indicate that you are completely out of touch with the scope of the issues, at least for a novice. You may be a grandmaster, but impatiently insisting that “a knight moves like this” is all a new player needs to know is absurd.
The most that has changed in modern HTML/CSS design since the olden days, is that most people don’t write CSS, specially in complex projects. They use a programmatic intermediary that spits out CSS once it’s compiled. SASS and LESS are the two go to solutions for this.
Javascript has also taken a lead in terms of client side application logic. There are lots of libraries out there that set you up with powerful data binding api’s that facilitate user interaction with the page and the server.
Playing Chess well is a hell of a lot more complicated than HTML5.
It’s in the interaction with CSS and js that it gets complex, but purely describing a document using HTML5 is child’s play.
If you want to turn that html5 data document into a fancy rolling full screen design with security features and facebook plugins, then yes, things get more complex, but he was asking about HTML5.
I stand by my advice, more important and time consuming topics lie ahead. .net MVC will take you months to get acquainted with, as will most server side/client side solutions (php, ruby on rails, node js, etc). You’ll pick up the HTML5 you need a long the way. And it is trivial by comparison.
At my college we split web development into three semesters:
[ol]
[li]HTML5, CSS and JavaScript[/li][li]PHP and Ajax[/li][li]MySQL (databases)[/li][/ol]
Our current HTML5 textbook is Felke-Morris HTML5. A good, color-illustrated book can be lots easier to start with than trying to figure out where to go next on the web (although I use w3schools in lectures a lot).
Our PHP and then MySQL book is Murach’s MySQL and PHP. It has NO COLOR! but can get you through how to create a database using MySQL and use PHP to access it.
Personally I used the (old) Harris PHP6 (!) book, and I also like the Robin Nixon books. Frankly, I’m still looking for the perfect PHP-MySQL combo book for classroom use - suggestions appreciated.
For someone who knows HTML, certainly. For someone looking at his/her first page of code, and trying to figure out why their HelloWorld.html page is displaying gibberish, no.
You are vastly overestimating a novice’s underlying skills - such as being able to write a truly structured logical page - and comprehension of all this weird shit in funny brackets. You are also vastly minimizing the complexity of basic HTML beyond the linear “hello world” level.
You are *not *helping the novice OP a bit. At all. In any way.
Being a bit of a superior, dismissive snot about it helps even less; the OP and other novices are not stupid because they can’t read, say, this page’s source like a James Patterson novel. I can. I guess you can. They take one look and freak out with a “I will never be able to do that” - but then, neither can any novice.
The only one being a dismissive snot, and an ass to boot, is you.
My advice was simple: What you’ll find in the tutorials of w3schools is perfectly fine as a first step. Pick up a book on the backbone of the web: MVC, whatever your choice of tools might be (since he knows vb, .net MVC was my suggestion).
I think he’s likely to make much more progress, more quickly that way, than reading a book on HTML5.
But that’s just my advice. Maybe I’m over estimating his ability, maybe you are underselling it. He can take or leave my advice as he wishes. He doesn’t need you to hurl insults at me.
One last piece of advice, 'cause I don’t want to be any more of a superior snot than I, apparently, already am:
OP, don’t bother with PHP. There are far better alternatives. As mentioned, MVC .net might be right up your alley, given your background with vb.net, but ruby on rails, django, and Node.js will serve you infinitely better, specially the better solution out of those 3 - Node.js.
Hi everyone. Thanks for all the advice - it’s all very much appreciated. I’m on the platform waiting for a train so I’ll have to keep this short, but just wanted to say I am working through all the advice.
Just one question though: MVC? Google tells me Model View Controller, but that doesn’t help much.
MVC .Net, which Kinthalis brought up, is a .net Web application framework that implements the model-view-controller pattern. Almost every popular Web application framework uses the MVC pattern but they don’t mention it in the name. MVC .net does to contrast it with earlier .net that wasn’t MVC.
MVC in general is just a general design pattern for developing software. It’s extremely widely used with Web applications but it wasn’t created for Web applications and is completely applicable to applications that run native on your computer or mobile apps.
When you are done learning HTML/CSS/JS, and ready to learn whatever back end language you decide on, you should learn more about MVC and decide whether you want to learn to develop well designed “real” Web applications or just tinker around.
As a hobbyist they’re both perfectly valid options. There’s going to be a big learning curve difference.
Like Amateur Barbarian I think Kinthalis is absolutely wrong for a couple reasons. While you could learn HTML5 in a few minutes and do this
You are severely limited if you do not learn CSS. Do you want orange text centered on a magenta background? You could do that inline or with the <style> tag but that is bad practice. Do you want two columns? Your floats and margins and padding are done via CSS.
Second, claim that most people don’t write CSS. Unless you are a professional making a HUGE website, most people would write their own CSS files.
Third, I disagree that HTML is trivial simply because there are limitations that make no sense in 2015. Let me give you a trivial problem than many people would want to do. I want you to center a picture <img> in a box <div> both horizontally and vertically. Now do that purely in HTML please. Bonus points if you can do it if you don’t know the size of the div. Or look at the suckerfish menus. Is that trivial considering it is probably on of the most basic menus to program? If your answer is “Yes, it’s only nested lists.” then I’ll point out that the original designer has anchor tags inside the <li> tags whereas putting them outside like
makes the entire menu box a link and not just the text inside. HTML may be easy but it is also very subtle.
I honestly don’t get where Kinthalis is getting these ideas. He seems to jump from “Use just HTML since it is so easy a retarded monkey can use it.” to “Learn the tools that professional web designers would use to write a website for IBM.”
I never claimed he didn’t need to learn CSS. I said a basic tutorial in HTML5 would be enough, and a nice big book on a web app framework would cover everything else he would need to know along the way, and in the end he would come out of it with a much more useful and powerful set of tools at his disposal.
So, in my mind his time would be better spent with W3schools HTML5 tutorial + a beginners book on .net MVC.
HTML should describe your data, it should no be describing how things look. That’s what CSS is for.
He mentioned knowing VB.net, and MVC .net is so much more approachable that webforms, IMHO (the complexity is the details, but the concept is so much more natural I think), also much better all around as a web application development tool.
That was a craptastic article. Let me give everyone the tl;dr version
PHP sucks because it really sucks.
No specific reasons. No examples of why it isn’t good. Just “It sucks hard.”
And yes I’m using python so not a PHP apologist.
It’s been crazy busy at work and I’m only just getting a chance to sit down and fully absorb all the info and opinions in the thread.
Firstly, thanks for all the replies. I’m clear on how I’m going to approach my learning in this area now.
I’ve been looking at the tutorial videos on www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com and particularly Bob Tabor’s beginner series on HTML. I’ve only had time to do the first couple of videos, but they’ve clicked in a way that books tend not to (for me, I mean). He covers CSS as part of the series, as well, and also has an equivalent Javascript series. So I’m going to work through those, while also using W3School as a reference to fill specific gaps or where the videos don’t stick for some reason.
Once I’ve finished those courses, I’m going to be in a better position to think about the server-side stuff.
Thanks once again for all the help. I daresay I may have further questions…
PS… My phone tried to change “as a reference” to "Azure reference " when I was typing the above. Microsoft is watching us…
Well yeah, the entire point of his post was that it’s no longer worthwhile writing articles about why PHP sucks anymore because it’s an exhaustively documented area, as evidenced by the half dozen posts he linked to. If you want to know exactly why PHP sucks, go read any of them. It’s about as controversial as saying the flat earth theory doesn’t have scientific consensus anymore.
