Mozilla Announces Web Development Learning Initiative 44
bonch writes "Mozilla has announced Webmaker, a web development initiative aimed at teaching the average user the building blocks of the web. Users can join a 'code party' and learn web development with provided authoring tools, and existing developers can volunteer to run their own events. To kick it off, Mozilla is announcing the Summer Code Party starting June 23."
Oh God... (Score:5, Insightful)
Please, for the sake of my retinas, I hope that something better comes out of this.
Re:Oh God... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, you mean like when you teach people to read and write, they sometimes write crummy stuff? Funny, the way I see it, that's still better than what they wrote before -- namely nothing. Kinda like someone who makes a website with blue text on green background is still an improvement over someone who doesn't know how to make a website at all.
And frankly, look at Slashdot, look at Facebook, look at any fucking page Google ever made, look at Stackoverflow, look at Reddit, and so on.. 99% of the sites we don't even blink at are utter crap. They're either white with no separators, or with separators that crawled out of the ass of a blind man, and then died. Blue text on green background would be an improvement in a lot of cases.
Mozilla websites on the other hand I can't complain about, from the top off my head -- at least they're constantly switching it up and try to keep it pretty in a ^_^ way. So if anyone should do something like this, let it be them. But regardless of that: I'd rather read more websites with mediocre design coming from genuine humans, than have everybody know how to play it safe, or how to install a wordpress fucking theme, or how to just use facebook instead. Fuck all that stuff, and the whores it rode in on, too. /rant :D
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This.
Computing (as in development of automatic behavior of machines) is still a forbidden lore out of the reach of the masses, but it shouldn't be that way.
We're at the early stages of software development where a few scribes herd the knowledge of the kingdom and eveyone else must subcontract them to fulfill their needs for automation. In the future we'll have software development tools that don't require having a career to create some trigger conditions and simple interactions; until then, it's good that p
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what is? the post I replied to? because
is kinda the opposite of:
so...
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Mozilla websites on the other hand I can't complain about, from the top off my head
Try this page [mozilla.org]... :-)
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It still gives me a vibe that an actual human being made that according to what they find pleasant and useful; certainly compared with a LOT of other sites, that each have lots more traffic than that Mozilla page... and if people who wouldn't know something nice if it killed their whole family and burned their house down can make the pages for Google and Facebook, surely "newbies" making "unprofessional" websites will not hurt, or even throw us back in the dark ages.
Slashdot had one "re-design" (I recall),
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Whoops.. I'm talking about youtube there, must have deleted that word when editing sorry.
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Mozilla, and the folks behind HTML5 in general just don't get it.
They built HTML5 with the goal of making it easier for your average Joe to develop, whilst fucking over professional developers by completely destroying separation of concerns,
What separation of concerns did HTML/Javascript ever have?
Re:Oh God... (Score:4, Interesting)
He's probably referring to XHTML, whilst XHTML2 wasn't really ideal, it was at least going down the right path in terms of doing just that. Though it's worth pointing out that Javascript/HTML is itself an example of separation of concerns - client side scripting separated from document structure, though HTML5 does nothing particular to cripple this at least.
Personally I'm not keen on semantics been wedged into the HTML5 spec though, I think that's a concern that could be far better dealt with like stylesheets. The semantic tags are one of my pet hates in HTML5, because they're based on a study that was out of date shortly after it was produced and it was produced in something like 2006. The set of tags is so small and arbitrary that it's meaningless, it would've made far more sense to apply semantic information to classes and ids as that way you could store them in a separate file, which gives you the additional benefits that they can also be applied to existing sites that are no longer maintained in the same way you can apply custom stylesheets. You could have separate people handle the semantics, which would be handy on massive projects, and you'd be able to update the available semantic options without having to update the main HTML spec or have a "living" non-spec as WHATWG have proposed. ARIA roles already basically duplicate the semantic tag functionality but do so in a far more flexible manner, so it's an example as to where, IMO, we should have gone, and should be going.
There are other issues with semantic tags - older browsers just don't even recognise them and fail to render those blocks, you can fix this with Javascript hacks, assuming everyone has Javascript enabled and working of course (they don't). They're hence not even properly backwards compatible, so if you want to use them you've realistically got to accept that someone is browser your site with an HTML5 compatible or higher browser. The other argument for the tags is to get rid of div soup, and sure it's a pain, but honestly? the benefit of divs is that they're generic, and by keeping your tags generic and applying additional information (i.e. styling) using the ids/classes, you're maintaining flexibility and keeping things both futureproof, and backwards compatible at the same time - new stuff can be added whilst old browsers can safely ignore it. Even now the semantic meanings of the semantic tags have become meaningless anyway as there's so much disagreement for example as to what should be an article. There's any number of questions that go something like this "There isn't a semantic tag to mark up this part of my web page, what do I do?" to which the response is "Use divs anyway", or "Use this semantic tag, which isn't exactly what the element is but is the closest element" - the problem with the latter which many people accept and use is that it dilutes the semantic meaning of that tag, an article is already not actually an article half the time, it may be a comment. You could argue a comment is an article, and that's great until you go to the next HTML5 page where someone has instead arbitrarily decided a comment is actually an aside.
There's some nice stuff in the spec, canvas being the obvious one, and web sockets if they ever get implemented properly in every browser, but in general I agree with the GP and think it's pretty awful. CSS3 in itself is pretty nice though, and doesn't have many issues with it beyond it's current level of support.
Really, as I say, CSS3 is pretty decent, but HTML5 is indeed a terribly thought out spec, the whole process has been rather amateurish and felt more like they were building a script kiddies wish list of shiny stuff rather than a spec to take the web forward. Many things such as accessibility and security seem to have been worryingly neglected in a number of areas. It doesn't help when you see grand commander Hixie engaging in flamewars with people and basically ending up with comments that amount to "I don't care what you think, I'm doing it my way whether right or not" - h
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No, it wasn't.
HTML has always been about semantics. What HTML5 does is update them and introduce elements that web developers have been needing.
Without the semantics HTML is meaningless. Stripping off the semantics i
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"No, it wasn't."
Nice argument, well cited, and highly intelligent. I can't disagree. Oh wait, you didn't actually have an argument.
Good software development is all about modularity, ensuring a spec is can grow to the dynamic needs of something like the web demands that you define the generic building blocks, and let people build whatever they need from there. XHTML2 was trying to do both of these things.
"HTML has always been about semantics. What HTML5 does is update them and introduce elements that web dev
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Neither did you. You just namedropped XHTML2 and that was it.
It was trying to do it in a bad way through XML namespaces
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"It was trying to do it in a bad way through XML namespaces, leading to namespace confusion."
I fail to see any worthwhile arguments on that page, unless you're working on the premise the AC at the start of the thread point out as being so flawed - that HTML should serve to allow the lowest common denominator to publish at the expense of professional developers being able to write better code. The web is in a different place to where it was 15 years ago - as the AC said, non-programmers aren't publishing via
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Nice argument, well cited, and highly intelligent. I can't disagree. Oh wait, you didn't actually have an argument.
And it is this right direction that I took issue with.
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Still, I don't even think HTML5 is the right tool for the job anymore, we need a stronger push for something to replace HTML and HTTP that better supports interactive web applications for interactive web applications, HTML at this point would be better left as a document markup language to handle informational documents, whilst applications are built using a new language. There's no reason the two couldn't interoperate well, just have web apps use app:// or whatever and the existing URL scheme can happily handle linking between them. There has been a few attempts at this sort of technology but nothing serious.
Extremely well said, this is something I've wanted to have to some time already. HTML/HTTP has never worked very well for applications, and it's becoming more and more a mess of bubblegum.
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An imaginary mod point (for lack of real ones) for you. If I were choosing a separate language for app://s it would be the existing SVG, Javascript (ES 5.5, just to be safe), CSS, and a language-generic form of object (called xml:object? though what if I decide I want it to be supported in non-XML SGML stuff?) to embed apps within docs (and vice versa) and music, video, and more complicated whiz-bang 3D or outright novel stuff within both. I'd ask browsers to use their built-in "HTML5"-or-whatever player
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And today the same people have Facebook pages. Was that really worse?
great (Score:4, Interesting)
I love all the new tools out there to help people engage with technology on a deeper level. Going to have to see if we can set up a local event for kids from the nearby school. They have been using Codecademy [codecademy.com] this year in some of the classes, seems like this might be a nice bridge over the summer and maybe something they can use throughout next year.
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Because we haven’t enough "webdesigners" alr (Score:1, Insightful)
I remember the (first) .com bubble
- where the taxi driver that drove me to my job, hat a HTML4 book in her car.
- where I had to work with a sinologist, a germanist, and somebody with a 1-month course in "computers".
- where I suggested using templating as it hat cut my work load by 90%, but it was rejected because "functions are a too complicated concept"!!
- where PHP became a language of choice, with people writing things like: if (myfunc() == True)
- where there were 8 lines of empty space between each line
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Above posts contains free hats. Don't tell Valve! ^^
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where PHP became a language of choice, with people writing things like: if (myfunc() == True)
I remember a story about a PHP coder who used things like $jep (Finnish for "yeah") extensively for variable names.
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- where PHP became a language of choice, with people writing things like: if (myfunc() == True)
honest question, I don't use php that much but what's wrong with that expression?
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Well, " == True" is something some people prefer for clarity, which I can respect, so I assume that he's saying people made actual functions with completely useless abstract names like myfunc. If I saw if (myfunc() == True) I'd be able to parse it but would have no idea what it would mean.
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It doesn't add clarity at all, especially when mixed with interchangeable != True and == False instead of (!func()) and != False in other places, probably for completeness. And such code usually doesn't stop at this level of redundancy.
That reminded me - I have sometimes pondered if programs should only have "positive" configuration options, for example "[x] Load tabs before being selected" instead of "[ ] Don't load tabs until selected". Is there some written GUI guidelines as to whether or not use "don't" to negate the statement?
Accept-Language (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you think they could teach the fucktards over at Google what the Accept-Language header is for?
That way they could stop guessing which language I want to see based on where I happen to be at any particular time.
Kthxbye.
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All they know is the User-agent header which they sniff all the time to decide which version of their pages to show you.
They can't even output valid HTML.
"That maker spirit" (Score:2)
Mozillaâ(TM)s Executive Director, Mark Surman speaks of "That maker spirit". We used to have that in the US. Now we have devolved into a consumer society. I wonder if we can recapture that attitude with these new affordable tools, or if the third world will grab the opportunity alone.
Pro tip, (Score:2)