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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

In the mid-early years of the WWW, (think 1999-2003) I taught several different completely non-technical people how to create web pages with straight html.

Not only did they quickly and easily learn how to write straight html code in a non-visual editor, but I also taught them how to interactively log in and manage the pico editor, etc.

These successes were not due to my skills as a teacher - they were due to the relatively simple skillset involved and the ability for normal people to learn something like this. These people were not geniuses. They did just fine. One of them went on to work professionally as a webmaster.

There is no reason to dumb-down web development - it is already as easy as it needs to be.

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“it is already as easy as it needs to be”

People said this when GUIs were introduced, and when rpm and deb were introduced, and system configuration utilities, and editors like pico, and I even heard people say it about Linux OS installers. This perennial, are-you-tech-enough in-crowd gatekeeping has accomplished nothing but ensure developers are three steps behind everyone else in solving real problems with as little overhead as possible for people who might want to concentrate on running their dry cleaning business or dental practice rather than learn how the order of CSS elements affects the cascade.

I read parent’s post as an argument for simple sites where nothing more is needed. If your goal is to convey information in an acceptable format, _and you want to manage it yourself_, it can be hand written pretty straightforward in a notepad, in single html page with a bootstrap include.

If your dry cleaning business needs a page with the opening hours, it’s not more complicate than managing your expanses in Excel. Except for the hosting, which is another story altogether.

To your point, this is also where the value of Squarespace like solutions lies, for people who still want/need to touch their site but win’t go the length to understand how it works.

Now,

> people who might want to concentrate on running their dry cleaning business or dental practice

Do these people even want to deal with a website themselves, and not straight ask someone to build and maintain it for them ? The same way that cleaning business wouldn’t spend their days in Illustrator designing new business cards or posters, they’d ask someone else to do it.

I’ll bet you somewhere in the neighborhood of 5% off small business owners used a professional-grade Adobe layout product to design their business cards but most have business cards that look approximately they way they want. They probably put them together with a neat WYSIWYG interface with heavy-handed guides that let them go from idea to ordering in a half hour max. Do you think they’d have done that if their choice was to create them with HTML and CSS?

The underlying HTML for their website might be as simple as a very complex excel document if they want to look like they’re from 1994… but a) that’s probably worse than having no webpage at all from a branding perspective, and b) unlike excel, HTML isn’t modeled after their common existing business practices, is a single-purpose tool for them and involves a bunch of other knowledge to make that html useful, like CSS, hosting, accessibility, etc.

If the technology exists to let them intuitively form a webpage like they’re working with clay then why not let them? If it’s easy enough, then why wouldn’t they want to form their own? If nobody wanted to do this sort of thing on their own, Squarespace and Wix wouldn’t exist.

I feel we're discussing a difference in terminology, where to me business card creation sites and Squarespace/Wix are not tools but services.

Case in point, you probably have to order your business card from the site you built it, and you continue paying a monthly/annual fee to Squarespace/Wix once your site is up.

Both tools and services should exist, and there should be something available at every price point. The point I think was just that there are simple ways to build a site if your needs are simple and you're OK with learning how to do it. If you're not there are myriads of other solutions to tend to your needs.

The distinction between software and service is irrelevant to this conversation. In this context, a webpage and a business card are functionally the same thing— static advertisement and identification. If nontechnical users have software to create an abstraction which gets written into a machine-readable format, whether than gets sent directly to a web host or business card printer doesn't matter.

I mean hell— most modern professional software development toolchains are at least partly service-based already.

> The distinction between software and service

I kinda disagree. You are responsible for the first, while the provider is responsible for the second.

For instance when we pay for gitlab or Adobe CS, if it's down it's on us to workaround or plan for the situation and deliver the final product to our clients according to plan.

When we pay for Squarespace, it's on them to deliver the final product to our customers, the puck ends there and if it dies there will be little we can do to help, short of switching DNS to a backup site.

Ok— Figma is a browser-based SaaS design and vector graphics creation tool— a large chunk of commercially-used vector graphics are made using Figma right now. Figma isn't a service because the end-user doesn't touch it?

Where you're drawing the line between a service and tool is an artifact of your perspective. Whether someone further along in the cycle must push a button to trigger some part of that process or if the code is executed on your local machine, a docker instance on your machine, a docker instance on a server, or wherever else is an implementation detail.

Web development shouldn't even be a thing in the year 2021. We were supposed to have flying cars, and instead we pay people 3-5x salary of the average worker to make a screen display some text and pictures. But it's fancy text. It requires codes.

This whole industry is a mass psychosis that generates dollars.

you make it seem easy, and yet not everyone can code.

Yet the value of computers and code is almost indispensable.

>We were supposed to have flying cars,

We were supposed to have something that would have sounded really cool to an 11 year old boy, but was actually a profoundly stupid mode of transportation and an especially unimaginative extrapolation of 1950s American life.

Many have tried to remove the codes, but looks like text is just the most expressive way to write software.

No-code is to codes, as emoji's are to words... easy to read and use, but also confusing and implicit...

I tend to come to the same conclusion. we communicate in characters forming words or sentences, symbols, and whitespace. As you indicate, text can be imprecise, but a good author knows how to phrase a sentence such that its meaning is better understood by a reader through varying techniques

Almost anybody who has used a computer before can, in about an hour, quickly compile text and pictures in an animated sequence to present to their team (after they forgot it's demo day) with a thing called PowerPoint. But to make text and pictures for a web site, we can't just fire up a tool and drag and drop some text and pictures. We have to develop software.

It's like every time you want a new chair you get out a two-by-four and a knife and start whittling. But instead of questioning why we whittle our own chairs, we reinvent the knife.

You must have a good add blocker if you haven’t seen the promos for tools that let you point and click your way to a functional website. There are plenty of storefronts out there built with those tools by people with little or no coding knowledge.

Actually a very good point, things can definitely be better

> We were supposed to have flying cars, and instead we pay people 3-5x salary of the average worker to make a screen display some text and pictures. But it's fancy text. It requires codes.

Are you aware of what magazine editors and newspaper editors/writers used to make in the heyday of print media (can probably add TV and radio too since the web has eaten that as well)? This is a ridiculous trope.

Flying cars turn out to be limited by laws of physics in a cost effective way and it also turns out that communication, storytelling, software services that automate processes (such as HR, sales pipelines, etc), search, etc are hugely valuable to humanity.

>to make a screen display some text and pictures. But it's fancy text. It requires codes.

This rhetoric vastly understates why businesses hire developers: there is far more than displaying text and pictures. Consider Hacker News. The system involves user account creation, security, and the ability to reset passwords. There is a voting system and an input system to record comments.

You need to run backups and set up auto-moderation features. There is spam detection. There is the need for performance and fast loading speeds. The software needs to be maintained over time. The website must be responsive, and adapt to different display sizes (e.g. laptop display versus smartphone). The website should run across different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) and on various devices. The website should follow accessibility standards.

There are strong reasons to believe that there are other causes than "mass psychosis" for competently-led organizations to want to hire web developers.

I bet those people wrote far more accessible and faster-loading pages than what the average professional web developer today creates. It's weird to see the complexity that's grown out of the latter group, which almost serves as a sort of gatekeeping. Always changing things for the sake of changing them, deprecating simple functionality in favour of doing the same thing in a more complex way, etc. My other suspicion is that Big Browser is pushing them to adopt that insane complexity in order to keep out competitors.

I think we as professionals tend to overestimate how difficult the basics are for people.

I'm certainly guilty of this ("how much can boot camp really teach you") despite the fact that I saw many non programmers learn how to reliably program (as long as sufficient examples were around) games via LPMUD. LPC taught an entire generation of non-technical people how to program and nobody even realized it was doing it. Sure it wasn't "great" code, they often needed assistance, and they'd never be engineers, but it was all working game data.

IMHO boot camps are for coding like going to the gym is for exercise.

Yes, you can do it all by yourself, in your house, alone. But being alone is depressing for many people, so they decide to pay whatever sum of money just to be in the same room with people in the same page, and a tutor to correct their mistakes.

And I totally agree. I'm following a course in Udemy to learn modern Front End (I'm a Back End developer) and it's boring as hell. Also, I can totally just quit studying with zero consequences.

Until recently, front end development meant knowing how to use HTML and CSS, same thing with web design.

I remember in ~2013 telling someone who was getting into web design that they should also focus on learning JavaScript, or even CoffeeScript, because just HTML and CSS weren't going to cut it in the future.

I also remember getting into a discussion with a manager in ~2018 who opined that they liked the fact that front end development now meant having to understand JavaScript, and things like React, because it meant they could hire "real engineers" for the front end.

I'm not a fan of that trend, and still kind of lament that a lot of people were forced out of web development because they didn't see the writing on the wall. And I can't really blame them, because at the time, schools were still selling students on web dev & design tracts that strayed away from traditional CS, and focused more on HTML, CSS and UI/UX over programming.

I've been a webmaster for 25 years and never had to learn JS. The vast, vast majority of websites on the internet could have been designed by someone like me who doesn't know JS.

Everything is already in a framework or library, and copypasting a few lines of code from the readme/howto is enough to add a slideshow, accordion menu, or whatever other snazzy but terrible UI gimmick that clients want.

The proportion of websites on the internet that actually need React are close to zero (most sites are cms/crud instead of "real" web apps), yet if you're in the web dev sphere, everything everyone else is building seems to need it. Strange.

The zero-knowledge, copy/paste frontend development you’re describing is a big part of why so much of the web is such a bloated mess. It’s certainly not React or other FE frameworks that are the problem. At least not in and of themselves.

> why so much of the web is such a bloated mess.

Citation needed. IMO most of the bloat comes from ad networks and tracking.

I agree with all of this, yet I can't in good faith tell others who are looking to get a job in this field that they don't need to learn JS, React etc. Most employers are basically only hiring React devs for the front end, to build projects that really don't need it. I'm not a fan of it, but it is what it is.

There's a bifurcation when some of the jobs that used to be done by HTML/CSS webdevs is getting done by engineers writing Javascript, but many (IMHO most) of the earlier 'webmaster' tasks are now effectively done by someone putting content in what-you-see-is-what-you-get CMS.

Webdev has automated the easy parts so much that they need zero development and the main skill needed is in writing good content; and the only stuff that does require actual webdev is those things which are not so simple to become a function in some premade system.

> it is already as easy as it needs to be

Maybe it's just because I haven't sat down and spent a few days learning it front-to-back, but I hate CSS. It might as well be GridBagLayout. Just the alignment of elements is magical (or not) and feels like it relies on the way the wind is blowing when you write the code.

For example, something as simple as 'justify-content' in a grid is (from my limited experience) dependent on everything around it. Change something that seems unrelated and all of a sudden your justification breaks and you have to figure out what side effect caused it. Heck, typing 'align' into WebStorm shows me a bazillion possible completions. Why are there 50 different ways to align things in CSS?

The beauty of HTML is that you don't have to use a new paradigm if you don't like it. You can use any of them, and just like with Perl, there is more than one way to do it.

Did you read the whole article? One of the desired attributes is “Developer-friendly, grandma-unfriendly.” In other words, the goal is not to help people who don’t know HTML. It’s to let people who do know HTML work faster and more visually. Which is especially helpful when you want to fine-the styling, something that was hardly even possible in 1999-2003 (unless your entire site was made of images).

> the goal is not to help people who don’t know HTML. It’s to let people who do know HTML work faster and more visually

I can’t help but think that this would run into the inner platform effect sooner or later.

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