My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website | Hacker News Reader

My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website

naya.lol

1,435 pointsfintler514 comments

it's good to see a little person having fun with all this technocrap that us grognards have gotten so bitter about over the years/decades. :) i hope she continues to have a blast!

(from the dedication page in SICP:)

“I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.” ~Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990)

Kind of reminds me of the quote from the Steve Jobs movie:

"The most efficient animal on the planet is a condor. The most inefficient animals on the planet are humans. But a human with a bicycle becomes the most efficient animal. And the right computer -- a friendly, easy computer that isn’t an eyesore but rather sits on your desk with the beauty of a tensor lamp -- the right computer will be a bicycle for the mind. A beautiful object -- perfect geometry, perfect finish, something you want to look at and have in your home. Flawless. And then a personal computer becomes an interpersonal computer. And what if instead of it being in the right hands, it was in everyone’s hands?"

Dude really hit it out of the park with the "bicycle for the mind".

I haven't see the movie (only a few clips), but I enjoyed hearing this analogy from Steve Jobs himself in many of his interviews [0].

Just checked the part [1] of the movie where Michael Fassbender talks about the bicycle of the mind. He is a very good actor but it's hard to match the energy and the electric focus of Steve Jobs.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmuP8gsgWb8

[1] https://youtu.be/BZYZlzIMVw8?si=u8X_mc4BX62ypRZw&t=98

I’ve never seen the full quote, and I really love that last sentence.

Reminds me of Ratatouille: “Anyone can cook.”

We make software so that someone else can do something new with it that we ourselves never imagined.

So important to remember that someone could be… anyone!

Yup! Not everyone can be a great artist, but a great artist CAN come from anywhere

Internet tells me that human is not the most inefficient, but pretty much down on the list. Sorry to be that guy, but to me a joke or quote needs to be true to impact :(

https://ghijklmno.net/a-bicycle-for-the-mind/

Funny, another commenter posted both videos, Steve Jobs saying it and Steve Jobs the film. Steve Jobs says what you say. Hollywood says it the other way. I suppose it also wouldn't be surprising if Jobs rehearsed this Hollywood-style for his interview.

This "bicycle for the mind" guy died way sooner because of woo-woo bullshit magical thinking. He was an overprivileged marketer who had a better than average sense of what people would like, combined a shameless capacity to crib others' notes. Like most venerated billionaires, his main genius was his capacity to exploit.

While i do not share the opinion that jobs was such a genius at all, reducing him to be just a marketer seems very narrow-minded.

Sometimes it's about bundling potential rather than exploitation. I have read many stories of the people who worked for jobs, not many of the "first ones" seem to tell stories of being exploited. But many seem to be proud of how much work they put into their work guided by a guy who seems to be there mostly for saying yey or ney. Which seems to be crucial.

Think about all the dysfunctional organizations you have seen or worked with. In my experience, most of them were lacking clarity, responsibility, personal investment & decisions.

The potential to end all wars, end hunger, free societies etc is there. I mean just on HN, the potential to transform the world by tomorrow is there. There is enough people with good will, enough people in key positions, enough people who are the best in their field, enough people who love to hack away as a side project, enough people who enjoy debating etc... here on HN.

All that is missing is the right approach to get a few of these people together with the right goal and by tomorrow we could take out / stop a lot of evil. This person must be able to "market", to bundle potential. But this person must also be able to identify potential & make hard decisions & do the things others would call "insensitive". Otherwise the people would quickly lose interest or be lost in chaos.

Focusing potential seems to be the most crucial part. Having a lot of potential but high entropy seems to be irrelevant in most cases.

Anyway, had to type it out because i just realized that partially i am doing the same mistake with my startup. Too stuck fiddling on the tech while knowing that i should be focusing on bundling potential. Currently i am just contributing to a entropic potential, which serves no one. Bundling it might serve the right people, at the right time with the right people.

Which infects my mind with the question i have been struggling with: is there any way someone like jobs could have been more than just a marketer in your eyes?

I do feel like i am looking down upon people like jobs who seem to be happy with just talking and never trying to really do the things themselves. On the other hand having this opinion of potential entropy... what do you think?

Edit: just wanted to add the after thought that people most likely call these people geniuses, whose way of achieving results they can't quite comprehend. And usually for people too attached from the problematic domain, the same geniuses could appear like idiots or sharlatans.

very nice comment! Both put in perspective the importance of Steve Jobs, while not aggrandizing him too much and instead shifting the focus to what we could do instead. Bookmarked!

Focusing potential as you eloquently put it is an entirely different skill to coding or engineering. I've been around people that do it and its like magic. Sharing a vision, presenting it in a way that sounds meaningful, and getting the 'buy-in' of others is all about managing others' expectations and trust. You really have to deliver and not just promise.

We were promised bicycles for the mind, but what we got was public transport for the mind.

In true South Park style.

Mr Garrison would be proud.

We had locomotives before bicycles, too. I think the industry can still get there.

Well what we really ended up with is TV.

“Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television – you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television.” - Andy Warhol

Life is a quote or song cue.

This sounds a bit like they're suffering from derealization, honestly.

Muni style. People crapping all over it from time to time.

the internet use to be a series of tubes, now it is a series of buckets.

In many cases id say the grindwheel of the mind. Inefficient and has the sole purpose of inflicting suffering. Perhaps not by 'design' but certainly through effect.

The YouTube video for Vulfpeck's track, Barbara, is interspersed with the interview where he said that quote -- as well as the first take of it where he stumbled through it and then asked to restart from the beginning to reword it better!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqD602G90o

Nice quote. Lost it now but I used to have a desktop wallpaper with the old Kraftwerk cover with "ITS MORE FUN TO COMPUTE". We need regular reminders. FWIW my little one is mastering the command line after a year of having to type to get things. Even if she turns out not into computers I won't grieve because if nothing else she learned to type, which is a useful skill itself.

When some people were proposing Swift remove the ability to use Emoji in variable names this was my reply:

> It’s hella presumptuous to decide that I’m not allowed to express whimsy, frustration, humor, or any other emotions in my code. Or to tell an 8 year old using Playgrounds on the iPad that he/she can’t name a variable :pig: purely because they find it funny. We don’t have to squash the joy out of everything.

As soon as I realized I could have emoji in bash function names I did a thing[0] with it. It breaks shellcheck, annoys people who I try to convince to use it, but it makes me very happy.

[0] https://code.ofvlad.xyz/v/lightning-runner

I miss the fun in software development in the workplace. Something has changed. When I started 20+ years ago, people would get excited about something new they learned and rush to tell other people about it. Now everybody is grim, too busy grinding and "managing their visibility" to show any pleasure.

If it was just me and my friends who were joyless now, I'd chalk it up to us getting old, but my coworkers who are the same age as I was 20 years ago are just as grim if not more so. They're at a point in their career where so much cool stuff is new to them, and they're completely dry and professional about it.

For example, I was in a huddle with a coworker, and we needed something from a parquet file. My coworker said he might have time later to write a script to extract the information, and I was like, "No, check this out!" and I started up duckdb and had the answer in under a minute. My coworker's response was just a monotone, "I've never seen that before. It looks useful." Not "whoa, cool!" or even a simple "nice." It was almost like he felt worse for knowing it existed.

It makes me look around at my coworkers and wonder if everybody could possibly be as miserable as they look and sound? And if so, why?

Certainly not everyone, but a lot of the people who have entered the field in the past decade are chasing the money. The never had the passion for it but they were and are good at it, so here they are.

The last remaining field is game dev. The pay is low and react kiddies cannot learn it in a week. I wish the pay was higher buy the passion remains there.

And if that ever feels too corporate/safe, there's also fan game development/modding. The lack of legal ways to monetise your work there means that everyone who'd only be interested in the field for money is quickly filtered out, leaving only those willing to plow a decade or so of their life into something for no financial benefit.

Plus if you go back far enough, you can work on something where there's no room to abstract out anything and your code has to be optimised for the bare hardware itself, which is always an interesting challenge.

Yes, game dev and developing software for personal projects. Corporate world is insufferable.

I would not assume they’re miserable because I probably would have the same reaction if I was them.

We have just been bombarded with so much technology and advancements in the past two decades that it really takes a lot to impress us. We’ve had ppl conputing, smartphones, electric cars, semi-autonomous driving, VR and ChatGPT. A tool that parses Parquet is very very low in the totem pole, compared to all the new tech everyone has been exposed to.

Add that to the fact that we’ve also been overpromised new shiny things that turn out to he disappointments (Google Wave, metaverse, blockchain, a lot of AI products) and its not surprising most people aren’t that impressed by lots of tech these days.

In comparison, 25 years ago, just seeing a webpage load in less than a second led to a Wow moment

It doesnt help that current quality of life is pretty grim, downright terrible if youre young, heck even if youre pushing into middle age. Possibly beyond but I dont have as much perspective for that demographic.

things that give you the mental resources to take the time to have fun with things are simply not avaliable to most of us these days. As a simple example, young folks have near no chance of ever owning a home, and it is sold as a personal failure. As it being a failure to grind sufficently. Natural human urges and desires, like having a family, are increasingly out of reach and are again sold as personal failures.

Everyone is grim, because the situation is grim. If we dont take the time to recognize how grim it really is, we will be in no position to start fixing it.

I don't know. It's not hard to buy a home if you're an American software engineer though, and aren't tied to the bay area or NYC. There are even places commuting distance from NYC where you can get a $250k single family freestanding home.

A few years ago I lived for a while in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was pretty easy to find a $110k software job that was pretty chill and well, not so exciting or conducive for the ambitious. Numerically pay isn't what faang might pay in SF. But faang workers in SF claim they can't buy a house, yet this lower salary easily could have bought a mansion in Tulsa. They could have even cut my salary in half and it still would afford a nice average house.

Probably not a coincidence I saw a lot more families with children across all social classes there than in my prior NYC life. Hm.

So I don't think America has a cost of living problem, I think the bay area, core NYC and a few other major metros have a cost of living problem. That's bad, but those are two different things.

I mean, if I’m going to buy a house, I’d want to buy it in my hometown, but that’s very nearly impossible even at software developer salaries.

I’m now living overseas, where housing is also expensive, but at least within reach due to low interest rates and just plain building more smaller houses.

Low interest rates increase house prices.

To some extend, but not as much as much as high interest rates increase the amount I actually pay. I guess high interest rates are cool if you have the money lying around to buy a house outright?

I'm in Pittsburgh right now and struggling to buy a house. Everything on the market are estates and get bought within a week of listing. This past one I put an offer on was sold in less than 24hrs of posting...

I'm surprised to hear this, I would never think to lump Pittsburgh in with big metros. Are you being picky or something? Do you have kids and thus school district is a major consideration? Do you have a specific neighborhood you want?

Really, Pittsburgh of all places? I know a quick search from someone from out of town is kind of shaky and there's a lot of local knowledge you have, but are houses like https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4411-Gladstone-St-Pittsbu... at $170k or https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1404-Marlboro-Ave-Pittsbu... at $154k or https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/107-Lilac-Ave-Pittsburgh-... at $160k not good enough for you or something? Zillow shows hundreds and hundreds of decent looking houses under $200k within Pittsburgh city limits.

These are incredibly affordable even on a 5 figure household income. You are very lucky to live in a place with such a reasonable CoL. I've known people to move there from eastern PA for the sake of that.

If I'm missing something, I'd love to hear it, but I'm pretty sure what I'm gonna hear is that you're filtering out a lot of the affordable stuff due to some interesting self imposed restrictions.

Many rust belt cities are de facto segregated by class and race. I’m not familiar with Pittsburgh specifically but just glancing at those listings I suspect they may be in “the ghetto”.

I don't understand what this means. As in white people aren't allowed to live there? What's the problem with buying these houses?

As a white man living on a very black block in Philadelphia, it's extremely difficult for me to relate or sympathize. People move from here to Pittsburgh because of Pittsburgh's famously low housing costs.

Sucks to suck I guess.

PS: Regarding safety, I went back and looked at street view for all three properties. All three appeared to be surrounded by well-kept yards and houses, cars in decent condition, etc, which is a very good barometer for safety and basic neighborhood quality. These are nice suburban houses.

Just for clarification, I haven't marked off houses because I'm worried about "the ghetto". The third choice has come up in my searches a lot, it just requires quite a lot of work. West View is quite nice nowadays and plenty of areas in Pittsburgh are lively and safe, I'd say there's only a few exceptions.

That’s about the price range I’ve been looking but it’s been in the north hills - The third house you have listed there has come up many times.

It’s not so much being affordable (I’ve gotten approved for just under $300k on paper, but prefer to limit it to below $230k) it’s just the housing supply is bought up extremely quickly. Anything still on the market for a couple weeks is going to have a bad roof, water damage, no central air, etc.

Sounds like you're pretty close to getting to where you need to be then. Buy something with minor (not foundation issues or something) work needed then do it. Even better if none of the work is urgent, so you can spread it out.

For example, central air is obviously a luxury. I don't even have it, so it's hard to take that as a serious issue. You can get around to installing it some day.

And you probably already know to make sure to search first for houses posted today, to try to do that every day, to immediately call for an appointment the same day, and work with an agent who understands the need for urgency, and to put in an offer same day if you like it.

If you take it as seriously as a job hunt, in such a gentle market as Pittsburgh, you're bound to be happy as a clam pretty soon. I envy your position.

I'm scheduled to look at three tomorrow actually :)

I'm working with a realtor and the realtor's platform sends me emails immediately anything is posted within my search criteria and she is very very responsive.

Just to reiterate, it's not so much I don't find houses it's just they go so fast and seemingly quite a bit above asking. To that point the house I submitted an offer on in 24hr and was sold had 10 offers in that time. There's a lot of competition for the low supply.

Houses I'm looking at tomorrow: 1075 Warrendale Bayne, Wexford; 205 E Railroad St Mars; 221 Bernice St., Pittsburgh

Best of luck!

My offer was accepted on one :)

None of those are in Pittsburgh proper. Sure their addresses say Pittsburgh, but they’re all outside of the city. As someone who’s also in tahn and has been watching the market, if you want off-street parking and more than one bathroom in a decent neighborhood in the city proper, you better have $450k all-cash within hours.

edit - okay I admit I got Greenfield and Green Tree mixed up, but my point stands for the other two. :)

I'm mid-20s and while it's not all shiny I'd hesitate to call it grim. Maybe it's naivety but my current lodging isn't at risk of being bombed.

> new shiny things that turn out to he disappointments (Google Wave, metaverse, blockchain, a lot of AI produc

To be fair, the more seasoned observers among us were not affected by most of those disappointments due to ha ing recognized the signs from the beginning they'd peter out.

Other than Google wave. We all thought that was cool at the time. But I think failure has more to do with Google's poor as usual execution. See also how they had near total domination of the chat market back when Gmail Chat was the most popular chat briefly and pissed it all away with constant reorgs and rebrands and refractors that went in a circle until facebook won.

For a lot of technology you know it's just a hype bubble that very loud people keep chanting about because they have money in it and you have to wait for it to go away, Blockchain I'm looking in your direction. But there are still small tech wonders to be found, it's just difficult keeping abreast of all the changes in the wider tech ecosystem.

> Add that to the fact that we’ve also been overpromised new shiny things that turn out to he disappointments

I was a young developer when Enterprise Java was the future, and the way you knew it was the future was that it used XML for _everything_, so I'm not sure things are so different in that respect.

I don't remember getting excited about the hyped new stuff that VCs were excited about. I remember getting excited about simple stuff, almost dumb stuff. I remember getting my mind blown by powerful programming concepts, but I also remember getting my mind blown that I could select text in emacs and run a shell command on it with a few keystrokes.

I guess when I learned these things I didn't automatically crush my excitement with thoughts like "you can't make a business out of this" or "other people already know this" or "there are bigger, higher-leverage ideas I also need to be pursuing" or "I might get laid off from this job and never be able to get a software development job again." I did have those thoughts -- after the dot-com bust, nobody was sure the programming job market would recover again -- but I had them separately. I didn't feel like I needed to crush the pleasure I took in small things to make room for the big things.

P.S. If you're burned out by grandiose promises, a tool like DuckDB is a refreshing change. It was probably built to solve a really hard problem for somebody, but for me it's a humble little tool that scales down nicely to annoying file munging problems that feel like they should be easier. If you have a CSV file and want to run a SQL query on it, or you want to write a query that joins a CSV file with a JSON file, it'll have you there in no time, no need to write a script or fire up a Jupyter session.

I’d say it’s because there is so much (free/open) code around these days that it’s not surprising there’s something that parses the file out there.

This is what impostor syndrome looks like at an industrial scale.

I find the best antidote to that is live streams of people like geohot, a man at the top of his game who is an idiot more than half the time when coding - "No! You're missing a coma, this won't run!"

We have access to too much information about how to do things better and the tools to do those things, so the focus winds up on retraining and optimising rather than just dumping something out there and abandoning it.

Flash sucked but everyone knew it sucked and that you could kind of force it to do a lot of things.

For me the joy of programming is thinking and making the simplest thing which accomplishes my need, and the regular intervals of satisfaction from a sequence of jobs well done.

When I started by career ten years ago that was how it worked. Around 2019 I noticed a change.

At some point coding was replaced with "HERE LEARN AND USE THIS NEW TOOL" fourty times a week. It is all kitbashing now. Software development has been completely replaced with devops. Low level devops does not require brain usage. It requires bashing your brains against the wall for hours trying to figure out what about your yaml file is wrong. Your boss and your coworkers are forcing you to use this and ten other antitools despite you already knowing how to adequately and quickly solve the problem with the tools you have. They advocate for the tools despite having never used them because the tools have a fancy (disgusting) react website. I have extreme new tool jadedness. Usually I hate when poeple show me new software tech, because they will demand I use it and I have to pay the price. I will never become an expert of these tools. They will be replaced in six months. Only 3-5 of our 50 microservices will use each one. Many of them will be redundant.

Joined a new startup a few months ago. The ceo had would take me asside five times a week and tell me we had to use this new tool. Kubernetes, helm, and 100 other tools appeared. At first I enjoyed the experimentation but it never ended. Work never got done.

At some point I told him "This is just a basic crud app. what the fuck are we doing. Can we stop playing around and get this done?" He didnt listen. I quit. Fuck it.

This is exactly it. You could show me the best, simplest, most elegant tool ever and my first reaction is going to be to throw up in my mouth as soon as you say "hey, check out...", because the last 50 things shown to me have all traded 100 lines of code for 500 pages of bad documentation while everyone around me fucking gaslights me into thinking I'm an idiot because I find bad APIs and documentation harder to work with than code.

I still have loads of fun when someone introduces me to a problem and lets me actually write code to solve it. That just doesn't happen in 2024 workplaces though. If you want programming work to be fun again, you need to start there.

This spoke to me. I see it as putting tools before ideas.

My funnest one was a big flaming GIF at the top of our admin page that said "production". I believe it was from "cooltext.com"

last i checked it was still there 10+ years later

I’m pretty sure that fun never really disappeared but rather than developers team are now full of non "computer people", like, people who never cared about computers from the start.

I don’t say it like an insult, it’s just that for most people developing things is and have always been a career like any other. We shouldn’t blame people to not be passionate about their jobs. Everyone have to eat and if you are able to perform in this job without passion, you would be stupid not to.

But I agree that for passionate people, it’s pretty depressing.

And even for people who love this, writing SaaS apps 9 to 5 for years can easily shatter the joy of knowing cool things.

> I’m pretty sure that fun never really disappeared but rather than developers team are now full of non "computer people", like, people who never cared about computers from the start.

I think there is something simply due to aging. I grew up writing BASIC and machine code on a Commodore Vic20. Programming was inherently playing. Fast forward 4 decades, I do not write code for a living any more but I can see how senior coders I work with do not have that sense of joy. But it's not like the industry has became this or that way, it's that our lives have changed and we became old enough to understand that work is work, and playing is playing. As the lyric goes we have traded the maybe for the sure, we have filled our pockets with keys and responsibilities.

I still write code from time to time just to be slightly informed of trends, but my corollary would be: if your programming job makes you feel like you are playing, do not be afraid to enjoy it at all costs because that too shall pass.

I hope we can keep it alive. The latest volume of Knuth is full of puzzles, which is wonderful. But then I see the other top thread on HN where people are whining that they aren't getting paid more than 99.9% of the population for sitting at a desk solving problems all day. Sometimes I think those people don't deserve to be doing this job.

For me what takes the fun out of computing is that package management is severely broken. I simply haven't been able to run the latest in DL because of driver issues, compile issues, issues with containers, etc. Sure I can get it to work if I spend 1+ days on it, but it just isn't fun anymore to try out something new.

    <body background="animals.jpg">
        <center>

Exactly as I would do it if I were a 7yo. Speak what you will about the virtues of CSS and semantic markup, these things get in the way of having fun. And can be learned later.

Totally agree with you. Not a front end dev myself, and I have multiple variations of "how do i center a div" in my search history, haha. With varying degrees of angry expletives added to the query.

Kids these days don’t know how easy they have it with flexbox!

Who needs Flexbox's inscrutable 1-dimension language when you can use ASCII diagrams in CSS Grid for clever 2D things easily? CSS Grid Kids are truly spoiled.

Flexbox, grid. You're all forgetting the best way to build layouts: ol' reliable, <table>.

As used on HN. It just works, even today.

Although there is some degree of silliness to suggesting table layouts in 2024, it frankly really is not that bad. To me personally, the era of float: left and clearfix and 10 layers of wrapper divs was significantly more of a mess. "Oh look, I got my layout working on IE6! Oops, it's now broken in Opera..." Anyone remember using invalid CSS to write browser-dependent styles? How about using Microsoft's proprietary DirectX filters to make PNG transparency work? In the era of taking crummy PSDs full of graphics and chopping them up into images for an HTML template, these were the tools of the trade.

Not that tables were perfectly standardized or anything, because I do remember Netscape and IE not totally agreeing on how to handle column widths, but they sure were, well, simpler.

Yeah, but HN uses tables in a really dumb way. Each comment is in a separate table with the width of the first column set to provide the correct amount of indenting.

If the comments were properly nested you would just have a standard left margin and the tables would be completely unnecessary.

It is almost a shame modern browsers no longer support all the fun layout patterns of ol' FRAMESET. There was a layout tool to cut your teeth on (possibly literally the way it was made out of browser chrome).

Not that I necessarily advocate for frameset insanity, but you know what? That is a shame. My controversial (?) opinion is that browsers should literally never break anything that was once a part of the web platform unless there's simply no other choice. If the size of it is getting too big... first, stop adding more shit. (And then maybe, implement some old features in terms of some newer ones. Not really "web platform" but I am a huge proponent of what Ruffle is doing for the web.)

I’ll go a step farther: improved frames and datasource-aware tables and lists with a few very basic features found in almost any other UI kit out of the box would have given us 99% of the actually-beneficial stuff AJAX did, but better.

The Web is a ton worse because we decided to build apps on it but never built the tools to do it right, even though the building blocks were right there.

IMO the biggest problem with the way frames works is that it doesn't work well with navigation. I think unfortunately that this is just a design flaw with frames and it needed breaking changes to mitigate.

I think I would've rather seen it go that direction, but it's hard to say. Without a crystal ball, we can't really compare the outcomes, and it's hard to imagine what would've happened in this hypothetical. I mean, I don't think in 2004 I would've been able to guess (or stomach) what the web was going to become 20 years down the road.

Framesets still work as far as I know, they're just no longer recommended for a few reasons. Browsers already try very hard to never ever break anything, at least not anything that's been commonly supported for years or has made it into a standard. The main places browsers have broken compatibility with old content are related to plugins like Flash and Silverlight, which were always controlled by a single vendor instead of being open standards.

Yeah I don't really count Flash or Silverlight as parts of the "web platform" personally, though I will re-iterate that I am still very pleased with the Ruffle project nonetheless. From a practical standpoint, Ruffle does a lot of good even if Flash always was proprietary and not really a part of what the web platform really was at its core.

I hope <frameset> continues to work into the future. I'm sure eventually it will wind up on the chopping block, and personally I think that'll suck.

> at least not anything that's been commonly supported for years or has made it into a standard.

It's more: has made it into a standard and was commonly supported.

Sadly, the browsers aren't trying hard enough not to break anything. They are trying hard not to break anything standard, but the problem with that is that the standards can change, or that some things can be claimed to never have been standards all along. A bunch of IE/Netscape things have broken already such as BLINK and MARQUEE, despite being common enough to "feel" standard even though yes they were never actually standards. Also, as we've seen with the MathML battle in recent years, even standards aren't guaranteed to be kept in browsers if not "commonly supported".

The MDN deprecation warning on FRAMESET:

> Deprecated: This feature is no longer recommended. Though some browsers might still support it, it may have already been removed from the relevant web standards, may be in the process of being dropped, or may only be kept for compatibility purposes.

The browser support table says that every browser still currently supports FRAMESET with simple COLS and ROWS, but as I recall FRAMESET used to also support more complicated layout tools. My brain recalls it as being very similar to TABLE layout at one point in time that you could also have (limited) COLSPAN and ROWSPAN options. Such things may also have been IE/Netscape era "non-standards". If I had examples, they are probably lost to time. Similarly, with nearly no way to easily search in today's indexes for things specifically from the 1990s I can't think of a good way to find old examples either. It's also possibly my memory is just failing me on this and the crazy things I recall doing with framesets were just table layouts after all and maybe iframes, but I do recall doing some crazy things in the 90s that certainly aren't "standard" today and I know wouldn't work in today's framesets.

I can't agree with this, because it creates a "barrier of entry" for people building new browsers. Old things should deprecate when new things do them better, and deprecated things should phase out.

Otherwise, we're stuck with Chrome Forever. I'd rather not.

Disagree. Deprecating things like <frameset> will not make it easier to build new browsers. Shadow DOM and WebComponents are significantly more complicated for browsers to implement than any old "deprecated" technologies. If you don't want Chrome forever, what you want is not removing old technologies, it's preventing more new technologies from becoming a part of the web platform.

We'll get better at building software. Even with huge engineering teams, we can only build the browsers that we have today due to improvements in large-scale software engineering.

Keep your eye out for Ladybird Browser and Servo.

I know you're not entirely serious, but we really had it good and largely figured out with tables. It's probably because using tables for layouts was my native language, but I still sometimes have to mentally translate divs into a table in my mind to picture what is happening, and when default types are change (like block to inline, etc) it sometimes breaks my brain and I have to fallback to experimentation to get what I want. Slight disclaimer though: I'm a backend/infra guy so don't do frontend very often.

> I still sometimes have to mentally translate divs into a table in my mind to picture what is happening

I still use tables (seriously).

Tables aren't even deprecated. IMO you're better off keeping the tables than transforming it into <div> soup. 20 years ago you'd hear it shouted from the rooftops: "Tables for layout are not semantic!". Guess what? <div>s are never semantic. Just use tables if it suits you.

If you want to remove the semantics of table elements, you could set a role="presentation" attribute on all table-related tags. I'm wondering what HTML semantics enthusiasts will say about this. ;-)

You almost got me. After all why not? So I had to go read stuff, and think more about it than I would have. So thanks for this.

So: <table role="presentation"> is probably mostly fine, but not great, and not good practice.

The ARIA spec [1] says:

> 2. Notes on ARIA Use in HTML

> 2.1 First Rule of ARIA Use

> If you can use a native HTML element [HTML51] or attribute with the semantics and behavior you require already built in, instead of re-purposing an element and adding an ARIA role, state or property to make it accessible, then do so.

That's because simpler is easily more accessible. ARIA is last resort, when all else failed. ARIA is complex and not always well implemented, or implemented at all, and when it is implemented, interpretations can differ. Your content will be more accessible to more users / for more browsers if it doesn't rely on ARIA to be accessible. And more often than not, you can do more harm than good by using aria attributes, because it's easy to misuse them, which is worse than not using them at all. Now, ARIA is still very useful and should be used when it improves things over what HTML/CSS supports by itself, but table-based layouts have readily available HTML/CSS solutions.

My opinion is that there's no good reason today to use tables for presentation. One of the reasons is always the same: separation of concerns. Structure your content, in the simplest possible way, and then style it. Structured content, with a structure that's as simple as possible, is more easily accessible. Add divs if really necessary for styling (which don't really change the structure, since they don't have meaning - keeping in mind that they are a compromise).

It's funny how everyone seem convinced by the principle of separation of concerns, except for HTML/CSS/JS.

You could use divs with display:table(-row|-cell) for the same result. Although CSS flex or CSS grid would let you achieve the same thing with a simpler structure and will allow you to have a responsive design. Fat tables with side menus are unwieldy on small screens and your <table><tr><td>-based structure will make it more difficult to offer a usable design to them.

Table layout are also not great on text / terminal-based browsers. Letting the content flow from top to bottom will be way better. You have this for free if you don't use tables, because usually terminal browsers don't understand CSS.

I would then reverse the question: why use tables when you can use display:table, CSS Flexbox or CSS Grid? What are the benefits? Especially when they are simpler as soon as you learned once how to do your favorite layout using these "new" things. I won't be convinced by any answer that sounds like "I don't really want to learn this stuff" because if we are trying to answer "What is the most correct way to do this", we should seek to use the better version, not the one we are familiar with.

It seems to me "Why not use <table role=presentation>?" is a bit like "Why not use this carafe labeled 'this is a glass' as a glass?". Sure, why not, it will work, but if you have a glass now, even if you need to pour the water into the glass before you can drink it, isn't it better? (of course, maybe not the best analogy, I'm not good at analogies, but I hope it can help understand my perspective on <table role=presentation>).

I also believe role="presentation" or role="none" is a code smell. It has legitimate uses (I guess), but the use better be clearly justified.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/using-aria/

> why use tables when you can use display:table, CSS Flexbox or CSS Grid?

The benefit would be that the author can understand how to use it better.

This seems to fall under the unconvincing "I don't really want to learn this stuff". This seems to be the only reason people are tables for layouts today.

People doing this are probably not interested in the rhetorical efficacy of the justification. In other words it probably doesn't matter whether you find it convincing.

one is a table the other pretends to be a table. There has to be a lot wrong for the table to forget what it is. try disabling style.

css also gets complicated much faster than html. I like to offload complexity to less complicated areas.

a practical example: i look at each row and set rowspan for duplicate values. a series of rows might have week 22 as their first cell and multiple with monday as their second.

> one is a table the other pretends to be a table

How about "one pretends to be a layout, and the other is a layout"?

I don't understand well what you are saying, but:

> a practical example: i look at each row and set rowspan for duplicate values. a series of rows might have week 22 as their first cell and multiple with monday as their second.

This seems to be a case of using a table as a table, which is fine. You should use tables when you are trying to represent tabular data.

i see what you mean. I couldn't imagine using fake tables for layout.

you use grid flex or even float (if you need L or Z shaped cells)

Counterpoint: no semantics is better than wrong semantics. If a screenreader thinks your layout is a (data)table, it makes your visually impaired users sad.

> Tables aren't even deprecated. IMO you're better off keeping the tables than transforming it into <div> soup.

I wonder if any notable sites still use tables even for complicated things such as, say, nested comment threads?

> notable

Good one

I always thought the Planet_ sites were the peak of table layout. Check out the source code on this: https://web.archive.org/web/20010301044204/http://www.planet...

Although I suppose at this point Hacker News is the peak of table layout!

If you use tables for what they were intended for or you have no problem with them, keep on truckin. But they sucked when they were the only way to do things.

I lost out on a front end job about 15 years ago because I marked up a business’s open and close hours in a table during a coding test. I was told that my skills were clearly out of date.

Table are used when tables are needed. Excel like overviews. No reason to not use tables. For site layouts (multiple columns etc) you would better use divs in a flexbox or something.

So that’s why some devs can somehow still manage to make flexbox layouts difficult :D

If nobody’s gonna see it to complain that I’m “doing it wrong” I’ll still just throw a center tag in from time to time.

Look, it works and lets me move on to stuff that matters.

I was really happy this still works. It's how I learned.

On the contrary, CSS is where the fun starts.

Funny how?

Fun as in being a creative pleasure to use.

funny != fun

I remember getting confused/disgusted looks at my first front-end job when I said I loved CSS and would be happy to work on styling...

Later I learned that having 3 or more different ways to get an identical result is... time-consuming, at best. When they all might work slightly differently depending on several layers of context (or just not work), you realize CSS is ripe for massive pain points to spring up, and they can happen unexpectedly. I understood why everyone else hated CSS - under time pressure, it's just not worth dealing with 99.9% of the complexities for immeasurably small + abstract returns.

Eventually, I determined that I both love and despise CSS in different aspects. It's complex enough to hold both attitudes. And I'm very, very satisfied that Tailwind came along and (nearly) perfected what Bootstrap et al were figuring out before it.

I decided to throw in the towel on frontend dev when I was forced to translate wireframes from a UX designer into pixel-perfect CSS (on a safety and time-critical project where the site was going to be used by back-office staff only, you've got to love how consultancies find ways to make $$$).

We had used Bootstrap and similar frameworks for years prior, but all the battling with different CSS layout techniques to render the UI on this project made me realize I was wasting my time, and the fact that the designer couldn't give developers working CSS made me wonder if the entire promise of separating design from functionality was a mirage.

The issue with this is that it lacks the semantic - styling separation of proper modern HTML with CSS.

Like compare that mess to the elegant semantic structure of a state of the art webpage like google.com

    <div class="gb_Ld"><div class="gb_Xc"><div class="gb_k gb_Fd gb_z" data-ogsr-fb="true" data-ogsr-alt="" id="gbwa"><div class="gb_f">

Beautiful in it's simplicity. I also admire how much JavaScript modern websites can stuff down my throat without the mereist whiff of necessity.

I imagine those class names are the vocalizations of some hapless user agent.

> Open up wide! Here comes some 'content'! Quit complaining, you can handle it!

Back in the day it would have been animals.bmp, drawn on Paint

I wish it played a midi when I opened the page.

I agree with you, but for shits and giggles, to modify this to be evangelist compliant, you could write this instead:

    <body style="background: url('animals.jpg')">
        <div style="text-align: center">

Which isn't much more complicated, and makes it clearer what's going on. I wonder if there is a transpiler like Elm that could take a single file written in a simplified language and gave you an HTML5 compliant webpage? You could argue that all the XML-but-not-actually-XML crap in HTML (angle brackets, closing tags, escaping special characters with HTML entities...) is also an impediment to beginners.

> Which isn't much more complicated, and makes it clearer what's going on.

Hard disagree on both points.

What is the value of writing all of that, compared to the simpler approach? What will you want next in your quest of purity? Forbidding inline styles in the name of security, maybe?

Disclaimer: I'm not found of web techs...

Are you serious? Embedding a language (CSS) into the string literals of another one (HTML) is of course much more complicated, and needlessly so.

Also, there's nothing XML-but-not-actually about HTML. Both HTML and XML are derived from SGML.

The kid doesn't have to know that's it's CSS, and `style="background: url('animals.jpg')"` is more clear than just `background` because it explicitly states that this a networked resource that is being retrieved with the url() function. If you tried to set the `background` attribute to "blue" it wouldn't do anything, because you have to use the `bgcolor` attribute to color the background of the page. But the `background` property in CSS is a shorthand, so you can set it to a named X11 color, or a gradient, or an image file, and these all work.

The `<center>` element spans the width of it's container, is only as tall as it's content, and only centers the content contained inside it horizontally, but this isn't immediately obvious just from looking at the element's name. Using `text-align: center` instead is a much more obvious way to describe what the `<center>` element is actually doing.

Yes, this is more complicated, but it is more obvious, which, I think, is more useful when someone is learning a complex topic.

If I wasn't in bed on my phone I would disagree at length and in great detail with this.

Have you met any 7 year olds? Have you taught any beginners to do computer stuff?

TIL there's a center tag and background can be an inline property

Wait until you find out how we used to change the colour of links!

I don't understand why they deprecated <center>, <b>, <i>, <u>, I still use them...

OBSESSED! She did SO good!

I taught young girls to code (founder of nonprofit Girls Code Lincoln, based in Nebraska USA) for the past few years - I love this! A few resources that you may be interested in sharing with her, age appropriate for her:

Youtube series that we did where our students interviewed women in STEM - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-32uv45Ln4VJGhVr_jr6...

Podcast series where we talked about historical women in STEM + a current woman in STEM - we recommended people listen to this in the car when their kids are there. https://girlscodelincoln.buzzsprout.com/

My email if you need anything at all, or would like further resources for your daughter. aakriti@TheNonprofiting.Org / info@GirlsCodeLincoln.org

TED talk that I did about HOW to get your daughter interested in STEM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guoLTuW8AX4&t=10s

Additionally, Pixar has a really good and robust coding lesson - called Pixar in a Box - https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar Not sure if this is quite the right aged resource for her, but might be nice for you to have in your back pocket.

Happy to help with pointing you to any resources you may need to keep her engaged!

This is for very gifted 7 year olds; I bookmarked it : - ) Thanks! Do you have any unicorn-themed and free recommendations for girls that age?

cornify.com

The pages load responsively, there are no apparent bugs in the code, the organization is coherent and sensical, and the writing is concise and conveys both information and the unique voice and personality of the author

This is a better-made website than like 95% of the internet, generously

I like the cut of your kid's jib. Excellent work

> Cats are about 2 feet that means six times there height would be about 12 feet. That would be a very terrifying cat

Yes it would. There's something wonderful about the paths that a mind that hasn't been fully toned the way society wants it to explores.

Well done.

Very well said. A 7yo is probably closest to their true „themselves” they will ever be.

Haha that bit cracked me up, all I could think was "yep, that'd be real scary!"

This site rules :)

> . The most common dog color is probably brown or black

trust it more than gPT

> computers are a very important form of technology. Without it no websites, no Roblox studio, and no nothin.

Don't you love the way children see things? So cute.

this line had me rolling. Love it!

I'm sitting here paying all my bills from my house on such a machine. No nothin without it, indeed! No lies detected, Naya.

I suggest you back up the HTML files as a record of her work when she was still a child, it will be a family treasure in the future :) You can even add it under your family's domain for safekeeping.

I would love having a backup of my websites from ~1995.

But maybe my memories are more exciting than the plain truth.

One of mine was caught by the wayback-machine, unfortunately before I ever got to add any of the menu or content functionality.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040207221902/http://home.no.net...

I started when I was 9, using Word as the editor. This was 5 years later and I was 14 at the time), I both wish and am ok with the content no longer being there. At least I can go back humor myself on what I put in the side-navigation.

I removed a lot of my older content from the Wayback Machine out of paranoia that future employers might find it and judge current me based off that. Pretty silly in hindsight.

I do still have code archived by Planet Source Code though.

Do this before it gets the GeoCities treatment. I regret not making backups of things I made as a kid.

And even better, print the website, and print the code!

"Family tree? Nah, my family has a git log of achievements and memories".

I love this. Her little site really takes me back to the age of the internet I often miss.

Back in the 90s, fresh out of art school I knew I needed to create a portfolio website of some sort. I went to a Borders Books and got a book about 4 or 5 inches think about HTML and how to craft a site using a tool built into Netscape Navigator. Over the course of a week or so I created a site very similar in function to the one in the OP. The main difference was the content.

On my homepage I featured one of my drawings - a color pencil rendering of a very large/wide man in a jock strap looking at the viewer with a cunning smile. Yes, I was very mature. You had click on his belly to enter the site. This was where I learned to make an image map for the first time. When you clicked it he said, "Ooh, that tickles" and then you were in where the portfolio and navigation was presented.

It was all HTML 4, no javascript, no cookies or forms - all very basic stuff.

And that site got me my first real job in the design world (at an Adobe competitor called Micrografx, which later imploded). The rest is history! Thanks, Netscape.

Since we're reminiscing...

https://donkeyontheedge.com/mahir/

> computers are a very important form of technology. Without it no websites, no Roblox studio, and no nothin. Without computers used have to use tablets. Tablets aren't very useful. Well to do stuff Computers can anyway.

Amen.

> Tablets are a form of technology that is very useful.

I'M SO CONFUSED. What is even real?

It's a very good website. Fast, simple UX, no JavaScript and focused on content.

Far more size efficient than anything my Frontend dev team writes. A Docker image to build a React app we have was 6GB. (“Its not our fault its NPM”)

And the content is informative too!

Easily beats the performance and accessibility of most of the "professionally developed" web, supported by entire teams.

Naya needs to take over as VP of Engineering at Reddit. The site would actually improve using her approach.

Also, odds of 'the hug of death' is very low on some so nimble.

Very cute!

I did something similar with my dad when I was a kid. First basic HTML then Dreamweaver.

A couple years down the road and I’m working at a SaaS company.

Beware.

Me too. First framesets, handcrafted. Then Dreamweaver and Photoshop slicing (forgot what this monstrosity was called). Via PHP portals, CMSes (Drupal!).

Decades later I'm tuning YAML files that trigger ansible runs on CIs that compile docker images in which we embed hundreds of npm packages that get transpiled from typescript. Which gets released to cloud serverless edge thingies that store stuff in a database and on some block storage. All to serve a page that's similar in information and feature-density to what I handcrafted back in 1999 in notepad.exe. Yet hundreds of times the size, thousands of times more complex and much, much slower to run and load.

(I'm not exaggerating, but I did pick the worst example. Most of my work is building backend stuff in rust, simple static sites in hugo or jekyll and occasionally sime JS or TS to spice these static sites up with client-side features)

> All to serve a page that's similar in information and feature-density to what I handcrafted back in 1999 in notepad.exe. Yet hundreds of times the size, thousands of times more complex and much, much slower to run and load.

Seriously, I think about this quite often. I recently found some old code that I wrote in the early 00s and it was wonderfully simple, and aside from a few visual trends that have changed, it looks pretty damn good. Straightforward layout, good information density, and very clean. The best part is the code is vastly simpler than anything I've seen/built in the last couple of decades (especially since CSS, packers/transpilers, etc started arriving). I grant that there are some good reasons to introduce CSS and divs and all that, and that once we've done that it is inconsistent to have some things done in html and others in css, but sometimes philosophically better isn't better in practice. Sometimes.

I just had a visceral reaction to reading Dreamweaver... god those were not the days haha

Oh yea in hindsight it would have been better to just stay in the editor and write HTML - but I was a kid and Dreamweaver was pretty easy to use. Although I did hit its limits pretty soon and tried to mess around with the code.

Dreamweaver was high end. Beginners used Frontpage

I remember as a kid (like at 13 or 14) using BBEdit then Adobe PageMill

There was something special about being a kid and pushing an update to your site via SFTP on the sidebar in Dreamweaver, then calling or hitting up your friends on AIM/MSN messenger to check it out.

This is adorable. Writing HTML might be straightforward for us, but for a 7yo it's a significant cognitive achievement. It wasn't long ago that she learned to read. Tell her a random internet guy is proud of her.

Maybe this marks the beginning of her journey in tech - it certainly was for me. I started writing HTML at 13 and soon realized that a guestbook involves more than just a <form> tag. That led me to learn PHP. That was 20 years ago and though I am now primarily a backend developer my passion for learning and working in tech remains undiminished.

My son is now 2 1/2, and I hope he too will develop an interest in these things in the coming years.

When I started using the web, this is what all pages looked like and tons and tons of people had personal ones just like this. It was so great. I used to love touring all the self expression.

Not quite the first, but this is how mine looked in '98: https://web.archive.org/web/19981205195643/http://www.justki...

One of my favorite aspects of the early web was the focus on customization. Your Myspace page was literally 'your space' and you were free to customize it with CSS as you pleased. There's a whole generation of developers and designers that started this way. You still see remnants of this philosophy in the contemporary web (e.g. moderators on Reddit can customize their subreddits), but that philosophy is nowhere near as ubiquitous as it was in the Geocities era.

Linked in there you have https://web.archive.org/web/19981206221926/http://www.msyste... which would be an amazing post on it’s own.

I had no idea people were already doing smart home things 26 years ago!

A solid 70% of pop up ads in 1999 were for X-10 systems.

Great job Naya :)

For other parents here, if your kids are interested in learning HTML and CSS with the help of cute aliens, my son (who was 11 at the time) and I built HTML Planet for Kids [0]. The course uses a visual editor for manipulating HTML, so that there is less typing and frustrating syntax mistakes, while still exposing the code directly without any added abstractions.

[0] https://htmlplanetforkids.com/

It's nice that you advertise your business here but for a passionate child this is boring. Double-clicking a box and changing text teaches them nothing, instead of paying $9/mo I can pay $0/mo and have them utilize free courses, YouTube, and teach them how to read documentation like MDN which will benefit them way more than simply teaching them how to use your website.

Not every child is the same - some enjoy our course and find it valuable. HTML Planet can spark kids interest for going deeper into web creativity. Self-learning resources you mentioned require strong pre-existing motivation and/or hands-on parental guidance. Some kids have that naturally while others require more gentle kid-friendly introduction.

I was talking to my parents the other day and surprised myself getting pretty chocked up remembering how my dad had shown me how to program an ascii animation on his 386, and how the wonder I felt at that in many ways led me to where I am today, so many years later. These things matter.

Do you still have the animation?

I’m afraid not. It was incredibly simple, but I just remember being amazed that such a thing was even possible.

It was basically (no pun intended) this, though obviously not in bash:

  #!/bin/bash

  legs_out=(
  "                     "
  "        .'''.        "
  "       -     -       " 
  "       |  C  ^       "
  "        \    7       "
  "          | |        "
  "        /     \\     "
  "        |  \\ \\     "
  "        |   \\ \\    " 
  "      / |    \\ \\   "
  "     /  |     \\ \\  "
  "    /   |      \\ \\ "
  "   /    |      |\\  \\     "
  "        \\    \\          "
  "               \\         "
  "       /        \\        "
  "      /          \\       "
  "     /    / \\    \\      "
  "    /    /   \\    \\     "
  "   /    /     \\    \\    "
  "  /    \       \\    \\   "
  "   \\   \\       \\    \\...  "
  "     ____]         [    ]"
  )

  legs_cross=(
  "        .'''.        "
  "       -     -       "
  "       |  C  ^       "
  "        \    7       "
  "          | |        "
  "        /     \\     "
  "        |  |  |      "
  "        |  |  |      "
  "        |  |  |      "
  "        |  |  |      "
  "        |  |  |       "
  "      ( |  |  |       "
  "        |  |   )    "
  "        |  |  |      "
  "        |  |  |      "
  "        |  |  |      "
  "        |  |   )      "
  "        |  |  |       "
  "        |  |  |       "
  "        |  |  |       "
  "        /  |          "
  "       /   |  |       "
  "      \\..]  /    /    " 
  )

  print_man() {
    local spaces=$1
    local man=("${!2}")
    for line in "${man[@]}"; do
      printf "%*s%s\n" $spaces "" "$line"
    done
  }

  spaces=0
  state=0

  while true; do
    clear
  
    if (( state % 4 < 2 )); then
      print_man $spaces legs_out[@]
    else
      print_man $spaces legs_cross[@]
    fi
  
    ((spaces++))
    ((state++))
  
    if (( spaces > $(tput cols) )); then
      spaces=0
    fi
   
    sleep 0.1
  done

This is really fun, thanks for sharing. May try to do similar with my niece.

> computers are a very important form of technology. Without it no websites, no Roblox studio, and no nothin.

Well put, Naya!

> Without computers used have to use tablets. Tablets aren't very useful.

That's the spirit!

Until you get to the tablet page, at which point it's useful indeed!

Classic marketing.

I feel bad for all the kids whose parents think giving them a tablet or smart phone is the same as having a real computer. They're depriving their children of something really magical by leaving them with devices built primarily for personal data collection and content consumption instead of a tool for creation.

What's a computer?

I'll show myself out...

I got started with Netscape Composer around this age, as you could easily switch between the HTML view and the WYSIWYG view and see what everything does. Seamonkey is a still maintained version of the old Netscape/Mozilla suite which has Composer.

https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

Don't tell me she also included Cloudflare analytics on her site?

Why on earth Cloudflare scripts are running on a webpage made by a little girl?

We fucked up bad. Real bad. As software engineers, we have produced nothing but garbage in the last two decades.

I doubt that we fucked up. I didn't, you probably didn't too. It's on the megacorp

I love this so much. From 1992-1996 I was in a band in the SF Bay Area. I played the congas, but really I think they just let me do that because I also took on the band's webpage.

It was dozens and dozens of pages of hand-coded HTML, updated nearly daily, with lots of easter eggs, etc. I had programmed a ton (I was a C/C++ developer at the time), but never in HTML. I learned everything by "viewing source" (at the time, most of the web was hand-written HTML).

We hosted it at The Well, which even then had a little bit of cachet in the community.

One of my great regrets was that we didn't keep a copy of the site -- and we "retired" and took down the site early enough that the Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy.

I learned quite a lot by viewing the source of this delightfully clean and spartan website.

You don't need a DOCTYPE tag?

You don't need a head tag?

You don't need to declare the charset?

The body tag has a "background" attribute?

The HTML "center" tag still works?

> You don't need a DOCTYPE tag? > You don't need a head tag? > You don't need to declare the charset?

True, there are many things you don't need for a page to be rendered in a typical browser, but that doesn't make them useless. For example, DOCTYPE has exactly one purpose: tell the browser not to treat your page like it was designed for ancient versions of Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, with all the "quirks" of their pre-standardization rendering engines.

Browsers are very lenient when it comes to HTML parsing. In fact, one of the reasons why HTML sanitization libraries like DOMPurify are so complex is because browsers will tolerate all sorts of twisted broken markup.

marquee still works too

It's a good opportunity to tell the history of SGML, HTML, XML and XHTML (and possibly more, like long-forgotten SXML), and explain how we (the collective humanity) fu^W badly messed up our technology by following the path of least resistance because some (a lot of) lazy as^W folks can't be bothered to follow a bunch of simple rules.

HTML is such a great abstraction and syntax. I wonder if the same 7 year old would be able to (or have the attention) to learn something like React? Probably not.

Maybe we should be testing our interfaces and API's with 7 year olds from now on. If they can't or won't use it, its probably a good signal the design is wrong.

Beginners, especially younger ones, crave for guidance. But what they get is often loud marketing and cargo cult behavior. Now it seems to be even worse than when I was starting out. For example YT feeds get spammed with fearmongering and clickbait thumbnails. Apparently the attention of beginners is very valuable.

Don't other crafts and professions have a stronger focus on understanding fundamentals?

There's also much more useful information today than 20y ago though. Even though the signal to noise ratio seemingly gets smaller.

She really nailed page load speed and to a large degree UX (links are clearly links, navigation just works).

Many large companies have wasted lots of money on performance and UX while still being worse than this!

I am not sure this site is web scale. The cats page probably needs its own microservice, backed by Kafka and DynamoDB. I mean, it's simple.

"Did you know that a cat can fall from a 32 story building and survive!"

I love how this ends on an exclamation mark and not a question mark. Obvious in hindsight.

> Tablets aren't very useful. Well to do stuff Computers can anyway.

Naya gets it!

This is adorable and made me feel good! I learned something about cats too. Thank you for sharing.

As the father of a six year-old girl, the cheetahs page made total sense to me. My daughter likes to play "Name this animal" with me, where she describes the animal and I have to guess what it is. Why are six and seven year-old girls obsessed with cheetahs?, I ask myself. My guess is that it's because they are the fastest animals.

Yet despite their ferocity still cute, they purr rather than roar!

I had the opportunity to pet a cheetah last year, and I think that is one of those things that will stay with me for the rest of my life even if I never get another chance. The cheek rubs, the purrs, just like my cats would do. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Yes, I went straight to the cheetah page too. They're awesome! I never much thought about them until that day, but now it's a fascination.

I would like to subscribe for more cat facts.

You know, I wanted to troll a bit by critiquing a 7 year old but I'm genuinely impressed. I love sites like this, her age aside that is. it is simple html and I can discover the desired information without any hassle. 10/10 from me boss! Tell Naya to never forget the simplicity of her young mind.

I showed my kid (also around that age) how you could have fun with PRINT statements in C64 BASIC. He really enjoyed it and just the idea alone that you could control the computer instead of it being a black box.

Perhaps a website could be fun too. But HTML 3.2 was much more friendly to beginners than everything that is out there now.

HTML 3.2 is still out there! Just use it.

Thank you for sharing this. Actually, your daughter inspired me to make a web site today. I even took some design tips from her. I was hoping to make programming fun for me and I guess not overthinking and keeping it simple is a good start.

I love, how the path for the computer page is "/unicorncopy". Already thinks like a real pro!

This is actually better than 90% of websites today: loads fast, no nav bars, no position: sticky, no cookie popups, no ads. The content is informative and straight to the point. A website worthy to be the inverse of the much ignored related guideline:

>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

"computers are a very important form of technology. Without it no websites, no Roblox studio, and no nothin."

Amen!

> Did you know that a dog puts its tail between its legs when it's sad.

Can you spot the mistake?

Neither can I. :-)

Well done.

Excellent website! Thanks for sharing, I learned something: the scientific name of a cheetah.

Tell your daughter to keep making things that she likes to make!

> Tablets aren't very useful. Well to do stuff Computers can anyway.

Naya just perfectly summarized 80 % of the MacRumors forum in two sentences.

This looks like a solid first step. I am also teaching my 8yo a bit of coding, starting with HTML but he complains about a lot of typing, he is slow in typing so it becomes painful for him.

Did your daughter face this problem?

We have her setup with iMessage (with screen time to limit who she's talking with), so she chats with the family pretty often. I think that may have helped with typing speed.

> Cats are about 2 feet that means six times there height would be about 12 feet. That would be a very terrifying cat.

Thanks for sharing! This is exactly the sort of smile I needed today.

"Cats are about 2 feet that means six times there height would be about 12 feet."

hehehehehe

Seriously, thank you so much for sharing this! It brought a much needed smile to my face this morning.

Please tell your daughter that Ben really liked it and his favorite page was the dogs page. Question for her: Is that a picture of your dog? Does the dog have a name?

I love this so much! Great work, Naya!

Incidentally, I was creating an image for a slide for a talk a few weeks ago, showing off HTML circa 1996 and decided to do it in Windows 95 (which is what I used to write my first web pages when I was 12) and it was a lot harder than I thought it would be (mostly because the intricacies of what HTML versions were supported in the included browser versions of the Electron emulator I was using), to recall what tags did and didn't work.

But I credit HTML with everything for me, as far as computer programming is concerned. Having a way to express markup in a text editor and see the results on a web page was life-changing.

Love to see first graders doing this now!

You better believe I went straight for the cheetah page. No, I didn’t know they’re about 59 inches long! I learned something new today!

Cool! I made my first HTML website in 2001, when I was 10. The ISP allowed you FTP some HTML and image files into a folder, and you got a little website.

Figuring out HTML was not too hard for me as a kid. Things enclosing other things is not a hard to grasp concept. I didn't use CSS and back then you had <center> and stuff; nowadays it's frowned upon as mixing up semantics and presentation, but back then it made sense to me.

But doing any sort of programming (like at least writing batch files that had ifs and loops) was way harder and it took me several years to figure out.

>Tablets aren't very useful. Well to do stuff Computers can anyway.

She centered the page like a pro. Also, It gave me nostalgia watching how fast the page loads.

Very nice. My daughter made something similar from HTML/CSS when she was 8 or 9, no tools, frameworks, just a text editor. (This was 15-16 years ago.) I think it's good not to be afraid to dive into the "bare metal" approach for kids who then gain a good understanding of the fundamentals even if later they end up using higher-level frameworks.

More correct html than a senior react dev.

Ok but did you make sure she used Kubernetes to deploy? :) Seriously her web page made me smile. Well done!

Hahaha this thread made me buy my daughter a domain and start to teach her too as she's been interested about what I do, and I was just getting things setup and yes, her site will be deployed via kubernetes because it's easy as apart of my infra already.

I remember doing this at about the same age in the 90s using Notepad.exe in tandem with Netscape Navigator to opine on paper airplanes. Maybe it's just childhood nostalgia, but that kind of web felt way more free than today's social platforms, react apps, and SEO.

> computers are a very important form of technology. Without it no websites, no Roblox studio, and no nothin.

Oh yes indeed.

Great job, Naya! From one lady programmer to another :)

Love it! Well done Naya, the information on the page is excellent!

By any chance was this made on a tablet? I see it mentions “tablet… make a website”. Perhaps if children grow up having accessing to tablets over computers, making websites on them won’t seem as foreign compared to a computer.

She made it on a macbook using textedit and the finder, but day to day, she tends to use a tablet.

Mine prefers tablet mostly, but every now and then she will ask to use the PC for some Roblox thing that only works on PC and I give her no end of grief for that :-)

Great job, and I didn't know cats had such a wide field of vision they could see behind them!

Tell her she chose a fantastic background image :) Also cheetahs are beautiful felines and instead of roaring, they chirp like birds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6Qh3VTmtxU

Wonderful! Lucky she, has a space to put it unmonetarized and under her (parents) agency and responsibility.

I host a youth computer club and help at holiday camps and see this a lot. Some elementary school kids (girls mostly) love to write.

All you need is to leave all the distracting tech aside (No tools! No frameworks! No cms/ssg! No autocomplete) and have a space without advertising or TOS where the results can be show to friends & family. Some also love to draw with https://twilightedge.com/mac/pikopixel/ on our raspis.

I think I was 8 or 9 when I started building my first website as well, and it looked remarkably similar to this. :) I think the only difference really is that all guides used uppercase for html tags back then. Happy that went out of style.

I'm building webpages since 1994, when I was 14 years old. Today, I'm a professional front-end dev of 20 years experience. I've grown bitter and resentful of all the modern garbage I have to deal with that has been invented by so called "experts". I officially request that instead all the web pages must now be designed by 7 year old girls who like animals.

200+ comments about a 7 years old website = :-)

Great job, Naya.

500 comments now. I was 29 when I made my first webpage. Her's is better.

My buddy who does not have kids is continually impressed by my youngest son and how fast he can pick up new skills. Just yesterday my buddy saw a piece of rope and he works building cell phone towers so does a lot of knots with having to climb and haul gear up. He tells my son let me show you a bowline. My son just turned 8. So he showed him once and my son was able do it. I always say let kids try as many things as you can their brain is so capable and so fast to learn things that as an adult take me way longer to do.

Oh my god I did almost the same thing when I was 9, I think I lost the website though. I took excerpts from an encyclopedia on animals and made small blog style pages very similar to this . It was so fun!

I was 10 or 11 and I was typing a pocket dictionary to become first online dictionary. Guess I got as far as "abdicate". If I had succeeded, I would have used a free website generator which we call static hosts today.

My son built his first interpreter in Haskell when he was 18months old

This is the best thing I've seen on the internet in a long time. I'm going to bookmark it and check back for more informative content.

I hope you tell Naya how much HN is loving it!

That's cool. I remember myself around that age. Before I learned about HTML, I used to draw web sites in MS Paint. And these both activities were so much fun.

I wonder when she grows up and starts spending all day on HN like us, she would be really glad to see this post and the appreciative comments here :)

Surprisingly similar to our own web page made ~20 years ago as kids. Repeating and animated background, some theme pages with a few words about some hobby or things we liked, and then shit loads of marquee tags, heh.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180330033122/http://moj24.trip...

I notice it did not go down despite the HN hug of death !

It's curious that clicking on the links doesn't take you to a /page.html but rather just /page. Is that due to Cloudflare routing?

Your daughter also put spying trackers on the web-site?

No darkmode, literally unusable

This brings me back to the olden days of Geocities and other free hosting services, when sites like this were the norm for many people. It's a fun trip down memory lane for sure, and the fact this looks identical to many of those sites provides great evidence for how accessible and easy to learn HTML was in those days...

Either way, nice job, especially for a 7-year old learning web development!

Awesome! I love seeing kids play around with code. Curiosity is very important at any age.

That’s how I started too. Back in the days of Internet Explorer, I used to click View -> Source and mess around with the HTML in Notepad. I’d change the content, blocks, colors...

About 25 years later, I’m still coding, but right now I’m deploying the data transformation pipeline (T in the ELT) on production server to calculate business KPIs.

Great job!

I was significantly older when I built my first website (19, in 1996) but I'm so glad I had a space to pretty easily put up basic HTML (Geocities, though there were similar options). No WYSIWYG, no build steps, just the basic text-only HTML which created a foundation to build on. It's unfortunate there aren't really good options for that for today's younger creators. (is there?)

The great https://neocities.org/ is still alive and well.

This is why I've been hesitating to support a full drag and drop UI experience for https://www.saasufy.com/ - HTML is not that hard. A 7 year old child can do it. It's good for the brain.

An adult should be able to become proficient at HTML within minutes, hours at most.

I don't have kids so it's hard to tell if this is the equivalent of web dev prodigy or finger painting on the fridge :\

I think it's just a kid being a kid. Kids are naturally curious and creative. There are plenty of stories right on this comment thread that kids doing similar things 20 or 30 years ago led to those kids growing up and becoming developers, so really I think it's an example of exploring, and it may lead to something much bigger.

Way to go, Naya! You taught me something new about cats, and I'm probably older than your dad!

Keep it up, you're doing great! :)

cats uri: /unicorn !

and computer page is unicorncopy

She's already learned to copy and build off of old code. That's how software gets made too.

My son used clay to make me an ashtrayer..

I often hear about the simplicity form factors of the internet in a bygone era, before my time, in the mid to late 90's. Now, from all the stories I've heard and the visuals I've seen, someone that's a third of my age now seems to be delivering that spirit of simplicity back :)

Thank you so much for sharing. This made my day. It’s so wholesome, it makes me want to cry happy tears.

No pop ups No cookies Loads quickly. Only thing is the cloudflare pages analytics js. Frontend masterpiece lol

:( Cloudflare automatically adds client-side JS analytics in pages it serves, unless you opt out: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/how-to-remove-analytics-t...

Though uBlock Origin blocks the JS tracker already.

This is absolutely delightful. Perhaps my favorite line:

"Without it no websites, no Roblox studio, and no nothin."

Very nice! And I actually learned something about cats. Never knew they can see a little bit behind them ;-)

This looks like my first website that I made for the game Freelancer around 2003, which was essentially just a short description of the game and a bunch of screenshots I made during gameplay.

It's nice that kids these days don't skip the basics.

Please, please, don't ever tell her about Javascript.

Wow. This is so much better than what I created as my first website in 1997 when I was 19 years old.

I am deeply impressed.

Laughed at this: "Without computers used have to use tablets. Tablets aren't very useful."

So true!

> A dog that my aunt has uses a button to tell her if she's hungry or tired.

I‘m intrigued! We also have two dogs and the more I know them, the more I‘m fascinated by their ability to tell us exactly what they feel. I didn’t know they can learn to use buttons to do this.

Have fun - https://www.hungerforwords.com/

Holy fuck that's incredibly interesting! The dog knows it's own name, composes multi word sentences... that's consciousness and volition on par with humans.

https://neurosciencenews.com/animal-communication-18280/

check out Bunny: https://www.instagram.com/whataboutbunny/?hl=en

Its so simple, I actually love it. None of the massive complex UI mess that modern sites use....it's like looking back on the early web.

Wish I was making stuff this cool when I was 7. I was just into Lego's and rollercoaster knex.

Awesome!

That's pretty much how I make websites up to this day.

Later, if it grows, I usually add a stylesheet file to separate content and layout.

Then I sometimes add some JavaScript.

Then I sometimes add some backend storage and processing.

Then I need a certificate for https.

Then if it gets a lot of traffic, I put a CDN in front of it.

And that's it.

The way the www used to be and should be. A true wild west! Nice job daughter!!!

You found a loophole on how to earn a lot of points! Now I’m gonna do the same. I just need to find a woman, have a daughter, wait until she’s 7, have her make a website and post about it. Here we go!..

Great work! Back in the day (when I was about 9 years old) I did something similar but for my poetry and dinosaur related interests, and that kicked off my still ongoing multi-decade journey in web development.

Ah the good old days :')

This is so cute. Coincidentally, my daughter has the same name as your domain, and I myself was making websites at exactly that age (but mine were about cartoon characters). Love to see this.

Thank you for sharing. It reminds me of a similar website I made with my dad at similar age, in the mid 90s.

I hope she enjoyed it, and continues to enjoy it.

I also hope to do similar with my children when they’re at at that age.

I wish I still had my websites from when I was around 9 or 10. Alas they were stored on a Seagate Quantum Bigfoot (a 5.25" hard disk which we our family PC had for some reason), and it failed at some point.

I was 7 years old when I made my first website too.

Back then, i remember my dad was having trouble using Dreamweaver. I went to try and help him, and found that using Dreamweaver was more fun to me than playing with my XBOX or PS1

I hope the tracking script is automatically inserted. Teaching kids about tracking before teaching them what a head tag is should be considered an eternal sin ;-)

My son web site: https://play-vista.com its runing on a raspberry pi. Written with help from ChatGPT/copilot ;)

I like it. This fondly, yet somewhat bitterly, recalls memories of my 25-year-old self creating his first HTML page in 1995, or even my 10-year-old self writing his first BASIC program in 1980.

Good for the kid getting her hands dirty! I was learning C by the time I was 9, but if HTML and the public Internet had been around when I was that age, I may have went that way instead!

I enjoyed the website.

It just needed a marquee, blink, visit counter, guestbook, under construction disclaimer, some pixelated 256 color palette animated gif, and you would become one of us.

in this day age, getting past the captcha, false positive bot detection, proving a us based mobile number, etc etc... is harder to get kids started than the actual coding.

I love this domain name so much. <3 Great job to your daughter.

This is great, it looks nice, works exactly as one would expect it to (very links, no clickbait), cats (the internet was made for cats after all) and loads instantly.

I hope she's having fun!! reminds me of the old times when I first typed some html code and see results. The feelings of achievement was so good!

I did this exact thing with my daughters (7 and 6)! They have a little guestbook with a password so friends and family can leave them messages.

Beats an expiring gmail address

Wow, that computer page comes with a serious color shock, but I guess kids like squeaky saturated colors :D

Having fun is the most important thing, everything else follows that.

Wow, this is so cool! Your website is clear and easy to read. It's super easy to find everything, and it works really fast too. Awesome job, keep it up!

Reminds me of my first website, back in 1994/95. I used yellow text on bright blue backgroud and wrote about music I liked. Only I was 10 years older.

That's awesome!

I love that such a simple page taught her how to make a completely functional website. Links, images, styling, and even an external script inclusion.

Way to go Naya.

Lovely! My first website was when I was 9 years old, and I used Netscape Composer to create it. My content was also centered in the screen :)

Well done to your daughter! She is clearly a smart one. I wish her the very best for her future career (possibly) in computers. :)

Very sweet, better than 99% of the internet already

Love it! The background is awesome! The 90s / early 2000s vibes this gives! Looks straight out of geocities and I love it. Great work Naya!

She picked the image from a search and download it, then I had her open it up in Preview and set the transparency. Worked out well.

This really takes me back to high school when everyone was writing websites like this... it was such a fun and pure time.

Well done Naya!

> computers are a very important form of technology. Without it no websites, no Roblox studio, and no nothin.

My son would agree.

This is so cool. The site loads fast, is responsive and will work on all browsers.

My very first website on Geocities looked pretty much like this.

Joy of creation.

Good job.

Love this! What a wonderful idea. I hope to encourage my daughters to do similarly as they learn about computers.

Your daughter is awesome! I love this!!!

Takes me back to the days when I was 9 years old making websites on angelfire, geocities, etc.

Is it her true name?

I've been trying to get mine to use an alias but so far is one per service and loses a bit of magic.

It is! I got lucky with the domain.

Thank your daughter for this piece of insight into a child's mind! Quite inspiring!

Don't know what I was expecting but everything I read was enjoyable lol well done!

Bravo, young one! And to the parent(s) as well for encouraging her in her endeavor.

Oh my, I did almost exactly the same when I was 8, but mine was about dinosaurs :)

I love the Geocities-era Web 1.0 energy this has. Your daughter is avery creative person.

Fantastic! Only comment I could possibly have is that the cats page needs more pics of cats.

Not very different than what I did when I started, with XHTML et al. She did a great job.

> no roblox studio, no nothin

Pure, unADULTerated, HTML ...

It's amazing to see a 7 year old putting it all together. Incredible beautiful!

I definitely learned some cat facts. Reminds me of my first GeoCities site.

Excellent loading times, amazing contents, 10/10 would hire <3

I miss when this was the internet. Just thousands of little sites like this.

no Roblox Studio, no nothin.

What's her hourly rate?

Love the 90s look. Well done!

It works! More than can be said for many things I have made. Congrats, Naya!

Q: When's the best time to take your kids to dinner?

A: When the graduate from medical school!

—Dave Barry

This looks like the pages I made when I was 14-ish (45yo here) on a modem.

at 7 years old i was running a 100000 user phpbb board fully customised

The cat page is my favorite

This is adorable and reminds me of my first website :D Great job!

Great site! I wish I had started at her age

> Cats are about 2 feet that means six times there height would be about 12 feet. That would be a very terrifying cat

> That means that there warm blooded

> there looking forward

Hope you told her how to differentiate between there and their though :-)

And "they're."

But it's OK, that will come.

This fondly reminds me of a simpler time on the Internet :)

Very cool, great work!

If you don't mind sharing, how is this hosted?

I actually learned something about cats from her page. Thanks!

All it needs is an "Under Construction" GIF.

And it should be hosted on neocities.

That's probably not so hard that a 7 year old girl could do it.

:3 so cute it made my day a bit happier thanks for posting

This is how the internet should be used! Awesome stuff

Great website, and very informative! Hope she keeps it up!

Fantastic! Are you going to teach her JavaScript as well ?

Aww, <3 I love this. Keep up the great work, naya!!

Some issues she can improve on:

    - H1 content is too long, it should be less than 60 characters, use <p> for the rest of secondary content
    - There should be only exactly 1 H1 per page

I hope the “/s” was implied.

I thought about making a similar post, in the true spirit of a “Show HN”, but would have included the “/s”.

Same here, but I figured nobody would get the joke. From his downvote count, it looks like I was right.

Even if not, why would it be so bad to give advices to a young girl?

Apparently so.

Obviously, but it still hurts me to see multiple H1 in a page

Absolute props on the cleanliness of that source!

I wish all websites looked like this again. Great job!

Come on, Apple. A seven year-old gets it, why can't you? Let iPads run MacOS.

I can offer her a job! give me her numberrrrr

I enjoyed browsing this website. Well done!

Pretty darn good - looking forward to updates!

This is absolutely adorable :) Well done Naya!

there aren't many tasks adults can do that cannot be taught to children. what are examples of ones that can't?

Anyone else wanting to see the original content of /unicorn? Cats are great and all, but we want unicorns!!

<3 wonderful project. Brings back memories of excitedly writing HTML in my drawing notebook and daydreaming what the pages would look like

smh, wheres the responsive react frontend and the database and nodejs backend? /s :P

...and the websockets!?

this is so inspiring. thanks for posting.

Bookmarked and going in the webring

she's done an amazing job! More motivation to teach my 6.5 year old something about HTML

I love it. Keep it simple, Naya.

If she has those concepts about html, she will learn more about html and then css very quickly with the help of AI.

This is really cool! Well done!

This makes me so happy to see.

Loved the cat's page :)

Let her play like other kids.

Looks great in Ladybird! ;)

got 93 on performance, 89 on best practices, 73 on SEO on lighthouse :)

This is very warming :)

Heck yeah this is exactly how I started when I was 6. HTML books at the library and websites exactly like this.

Love this OP, thank you for sharing.

Recently I see more and more articles and social media posts surprised about the current youth’s lack of a mental model how computers actually work. I assume this is due to smartphones and tablets not letting them experiment. Laptop hardware is also usually not made to tinker with.

OP, I think you’re doing your daughter a great service with building an attitude that computers are just machines that can be learned about and understood. I started with HTML at 10 years old, and it gave me a lasting passion about the internet and connecting the world, leading to peace among distant people. Nowadays as an adult I’m unfortunately disillusioned due to negative aspects of social media, dating apps, and fake news, but alas..

Maybe in the future you can show her light javascript, the WAMP stack to make a guestbook (beware of spam nowadays), a cat image gallery with upload function (and a password). The latter features requiring something like PHP or perhaps python nowadays, and some database (I used mysql 25 years ago, perhaps sqlite or postgres nowadays?)

Nice website, Naya!

it's so cute, I love everything about it

This is the way.

excellent read. my favourite webpage now!

Under 100KB :)

I love that https://naya.lol/unicorn is the cats page. This is wonderful. Sharing this in the company Slack like a boomer.

strange. still not indexed by google

wow, Congrats her to dev community.

Kids should be outside playing with other kids.

Good webpage

does she feel like dropping a frontend framework soon? modern webdev needs that sort of simplicity and focus on content.

Beautiful ♥

what the hell since when do emojis work on this site??

I think they work anyplace that supports utf-8 I would be disappointed if any printable unicode character did not work

[big smile]

Great job!

Cute!

> Sometimes they can sleep up to like 18 or 12 hours a day. That is a lot of sleeping for a cat.

Can we just put the author of these pages in charge of the whole Internet please?

Well done.

whats the dns setup?

excellent website!

Now tell her to deploy it on Kubernetes.

wholesome moment

good job naya

keep at it

Cute. I'd like to see a pony page please.

I love this. Simple. Informative. Fun.

it's so refreshing not to get popups and cookie gdpr nice!

Hell yeah, this is awesome

cmd + option + U

...

satisfied smile

so fucking adorable

Now this is the real internet. Real people writing about things they're interested in, and not with the intention of turning it into a content farm. Of course at 7 years old we cannot expect a deep, fleshed out site like in the Geocities golden age, but I wish older kids and adults would continue this practice of authoring their own pages, and manually linking them together. CMSes are incredibly limiting by design, every template forces you into the default of "blog post writing mode" when HTML offers so much more flexibility.

Agreed. I think it more has become a race to the bottom in terms of content quality/sameness due to it really being a race to make some level of profit. The whole side Hussle culture, and hyper capitalization of all things is quite prevalent throughout society. So of course it influences us to view things with the lens of "is this worth my time if I can't make $x/hr doing it?"

Also, as a nondeveloper i think there is room for a centralized hub for decentralized geocities-esc websites. Especially with the degradation of google search over the years, and the potential for a race to a deeper bottom than before due to AI generated content

See also: Dead internet theory

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

Whats wrong with using a CMS? A lot of them offer html content elements if you wish to express yourself more freely

I don't miss the days of framesets and including the header, footer and menu over and over again

A CMS makes the backend inaccessible. Want to add inline styles to a page? You can't. Want to embed a script for some quick interactivity? You can't. Of course you could attempt to locate the theme files and edit them, and edit the configuration files to enqueue scripts but at that point you're no longer having fun.

The only thing you can do is write paragraphs in templated portions of the page. And that's who a CMS is for: people who are doing a job, and have no curiosity about looking under the hood and messing around.

That's not my experience working for CMS like TYPO3 for many years. Although actually using that power without proper training for the editors often results in chaos.

Wow, great stuff. Tell her she did a fantastic job!

---

By necessity, kids these days don't even need to learn what a file is. Videos are "on youtube". Documents are stored "in ms word".

The median developer even seems to have a very shallow understanding of how a computer actually works. And why would they, if they can just glue some Lambdas together to earn a buck?

---

Praise those that look a bit deeper and really want to know how a thing works, how you can create something truly original with a tool, instead of simply using it along the happy path.

Files are an abstraction that was very useful in the last several decades, but that just isn't as relevant in the current world. Those videos and documents you mentioned are likely managed via object storage in a distributed database, itself possibly using block storage directly, with no actual "file" in an old-school filesystem anywhere in sight.

I still personally cling to files personally, but I have no real reason to believe that they are a fundamental abstraction that is more true than cloud lambdas.

Sure, call them byte streams or blobs, that's fine too. I'm not disagreeing, but the point I wanted to make was that recently, people seem to have gotten the idea that their objects are semi-magical things locked into some app or some cloud service. Which is fine by the SaaS providers, or course. But it doesn't really foster understanding of the world around you.

Like kids thinking corn comes from the corn factory.

When I was a kid I used to think that pasta came from a pasta factory.

When we were children we were taught about the spaghetti harvest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU

Hah, so young and foolish. Everyone knows pasta grows on trees: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8scpGwbvxvI

I think that part of the reason for my thinking is that I've recently been playing around with USD (Universal Scene Description). It is currently mostly based on files, but I find the underlying representation - of layers of atomic properties being composed together in a massive tree - to be very elegant, and it can be managed in a database without any files or blobs anywhere.

As another example: in the early web, behind every url was a file (with an actual file extension), but then we abstracted them into resources, and I feel that this coincided with an evolution of the field.

The concept of a file or blob will probably still be useful in some capacity for decades to come, but I wouldn't want it to hinder us from realizing better abstractions.

Until you try creating one of those videos, and now you need .movs and .mp3s and .pngs and a place to store the render output.

Files have a way to go yet.

Also, replying to myself, have you ever had a job? At a place? Where the primary function isn't coding?

Files are everywhere. They are every-thing. Except now, thanks to the disaster that is SharePoint, nobody has a fucking idea where they are any more. Because they've been abstracted away by some genius on the Teams team.

So nobody can find what they were just working on. Or they have no idea if the thing they find is the right version. It's a total shambles.

A hierarchical file system was boring, but it worked. And it still does.

Disclosure: I'm Johnny.Decimal and my business depends on files still being a thing.

I can't believe I'm seriously reading a discussion around the existence of files, what is this, an SNL sketch?

This very site is being served from a file system.

I don't think the comment was about the "file system", more like about the "humans" that dump every file they have to whichever folder they find available, and in the end of the day/week/month/year nobody knows where that file is.

And then the person leaves the company/org and this file will float in space (SharePoint) forever, never to be recalled again, never to be read again, alone, in a cold world (computer room).

Speaking about SNL sketch.. it reminded me James Cameron's reaction on the Papyrus sketch --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm1-k__LF40

>And then the person leaves the company/org and this file will float in space (SharePoint) forever, never to be recalled again, never to be read again, alone, in a cold world (computer room).

It will likely eventually be used as training data for an LLM and get an afterlife. Resistance is futile.

You’d be surprised! With many apps on the iPhone you can get by

Edit a video? Built in app, or your social media app is already loaded with that and you can save state instead of posting

Reverse a video? There’s an app for that which just goes back into your Photos app to let you tried that content

and so on

people dont need to have that mental model until something breaks

Right, but those videos are amateur and get 200 views on TikTok.

You want to produce a video of any quality at all? You're using files.

source quality and editing prowess doesnt matters at all for views

and you can edit in high quality on an iphone, higher than what’s necessary to view on an iphone

so, two premises that arent substantiated

Show me a million-view TikToker that does it unedited with no files.

They might exist. I don’t watch TT, I’m happy to be wrong.

But MKBHD, Justine, Mr. Beast, CGP Grey — you name ‘em, they use files to edit a production.

That’s such a random bar with such random outliers

Someone that doesn’t watch tiktok thinks a millions views is a lot there

Stick with YouTube your worldview isn’t relevant this decade

Abstractions will start coming and they don't stop coming.

People in the late 90s/early 2000s probably complained about people like me who learned about HTML but only had a shallow understanding of how laying out a GUI and text rendering works. Which why would we, when we could just glue some HTML together to make a Chrono Trigger fan site?

Abstractions are fine. Everything we do is a dozen layers of abstraction on top of the metal anyway.

It just happens that people who know how the bits actually move underneath the abstractions tend to be better at solving problems related to those abstractions, than those who don't.

There are problems where understanding one level below the abstractions indeed leads to better solutions. However, I would argue that for a large set of problems, this is not the case. I think being aware of the abstraction (at multiple levels) would lead you to choose the right abstraction level for solving the problem. Of course, apart from school assignments, these abstraction levels are never given with a certain problem, so the more you know, the better you'll be able to see it.

To be honest, being able to think about things in multiple levels of abstraction is an advantage no matter what level you are (writing assembly or writing react)

It's because abstractions always leak. You are never completely insulated from the levels above or below you, nor sideways from the other components you interact with.

Exactly. I said a variation of this and some user flagged my comment.

> By necessity, kids these days don't even need to learn what a file is. Videos are "on youtube". Documents are stored "in ms word".

Coincidentally, I've been thinking about that recently. My conclusion was that this couldn't be true, as it didn't make any sense.

I mean, even when using a phone or a tablet, the pictures they take or the videos they make end up somewhere. And that somewhere must be found, to be able to upload their take to the app or the website of their choice, or to be edited in an app before uploading.

So by extension, as that medium is "somewhere" on their device, they must be able, intuitively, to deduce the concept of a file?

And the take on the median developer frightens me even more. Somehow it feels akin to giving a soldier a firearm and letting him off to go and fight. Surely that's going to end in disaster?

    Praise those that look a bit deeper and really want to know how a thing works

Are people really that hermetic to understanding how the items and tool they use actually work?

> Are people really that hermetic to understanding how the items and tool they use actually work?

From what I've seen in some of our new recruits, yes. And those are technically educated people.

In general public, I've noticed that if stuff is working well, people don't tend to take a deep look into how it works.

I guess that's how different minds work right ? For example a curious mind wants to know how a thing behaves and how it works etc, whereas a visual mind would look for how it looks.

> From what I've seen in some of our new recruits, yes. And those are technically educated people.

That's really the part I can't wrap my head around.. The first thing I tend to do when I encounter something new -a new phone, a new bike, new tools, etc- is to understand how it works, to see what I can do with it, what its limits are, and most importantly, if I can bend those limits to suit my needs..

Accepting something at face value is really not an option. Partly because, more often than not, that would also mean settling for mediocrity as "quality" seems to be a secondary target nowadays. Thing will not work how you want, things will break and will need to be repaired, some artificial constraints might be need to be circumvented. And on the other hand, there is always something interesting that can be learned by being curious.

We are not all wired the same. But if the "technically educated" people are no longer "technical" than at least I shouldn't fear about future employability.

I'm 22, and most of my "not tech savvy" peers and anyone I've met under 20 have zero concept of how most tech actually works.

The pictures taken on your phone are not "stored somewhere", they are stored "in Google" or "in iCloud" or "in the photos app". Documents are similarily "in Google" or "in Word". There's no intuitive relation between photos and documents being the same thing on the filesystem, nor is there a concept of the filesystem at all. Generally, things jusr "work" (until they don't) and nobody asks any questions.

Now, I would like to clarify that this isn't a "darn kids these days" tangent, in fact, it's the opposite: darn adults these days won't teach their kids how to use the computer!

I would expect/really hope that when my generation starts having kids, computer literacy will start going up again. But for now, it's totally in the drain.

With respect to developers... Most of them know a lot less than they should. This is also an education/incentives problem.

> darn adults these days won't teach their kids how to use the computer!

I would bet most of the greyhaired people on here as well as those who were born at the time of the personal computer revolution didn't have parents who were proficient in a technology that was literally just made available to consumers yet those kids learn to use a computer on their own at a time where there was no internet available to check.

Why do kids suddenly need to be taught personally when they are the first generation to have the greatest amount of resources to learn how to use a computer available for free, in multiple teaching styles, multiple formats, at different levels of detail?

I feel this is related to the helicopter parent mentality that replaced parenting styles from earlier periods

It ain't that deep. Back then, you had to understand the lower level concepts in order to use the computer... Nowadays, you don't. It's that simple.

Still an abstraction if you don't understand how each of the parts of the computer work. And that level of detail goes all the way down to the actual implementation of the logic gates. One who could also include how your monitor display work and the keyboard.

Lower is not lowest.

I am the last generation that helped my parents with technical setup and support, and my children with technical setup and support.

For the childrens' sake I hope so. Parental accumulated tech debt from not keeping up with developments is stressful to deal with!

Looking around though I think it's going to depend on what industry parents are in. There's still a lot of cluelessness around even among people who have grown up in an era of computers.

Great speed scores, reasonable SEO and best-practices scores, a few accessibility-related nitpicks but none critical. So, better than most professionals.

https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-naya-lol/tkn3le4d53

I wasn't going to go there but 9 errors, warnings and infos.

https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https://naya.lol/

Compared to most websites, that is superb!

  <!-- Cloudflare Pages Analytics --><script defer src='https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js' data-cf-beacon='{"token": "cf82897298e84b9eb36d9490803c2538"}'></script>

Ah, kids these days!

When I was a child all we had was funky site counters. Kids these days! I wonder if she deployed this using kubernetes or what.

Cloudflare automatically insert that snippet in your proxied pages. I don't know if you can opt out, but certainly is not an opt-in feature AFAIK.

   <img src="catcute.jpg" width="500px" height="400px" ></img>

Width and height must be specified without units (although looks like browsers accept it, probably by ignoring the unit). IMG tags are self-closing, so you can omit </img>

   <img src="wool.jpg" width="500px" height="400px" ></img>

The dog picture has wrong aspect ratio. The dog is squeezed! It should be 620 × 349 or, if 500 width or 400 height is needed, there's a good mathematical task to calculate the size of the other side.

   <br/>

No need for / in HTML.

   unicorn.html
   unicorncopy.html

Page for cats is named unicorn.html! and for computers it's unicorncopy!!!

PS I don't like that CloudFlare Pages strips .html. Too magical.

Is this code review of HTML written by a 7 year old too hackernews, or just hackernews enough? Who can tell!

Yes.

When the Trump assassination attempt happened last week and every single post on here was still about computers that's when I realized this place is different

We need our safe space.

Isn’t that kind of on purpose though? I think you will get flagged if you just post general news articles. It looks like political posts are only accepted if they have some relation to technology.

It’s not a secret HN is not a site for general news. That’s the first item in the guidelines:

> What to Submit

> (…)

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It is because you’d hear about that anywhere and everywhere else that it doesn’t belong here. Would you complain that a forum about cooking or sharing wallpapers didn’t cover the news as well?

Though it was submitted and discussed anyway, which always happens. That can be confirmed with your own keywords.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

There do seem to be posts.

I’m not sure of the activity level of HN at the time it occurred.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...

That's why I come here instead of other places.

I wouldn't mind reading about it here in like 2 weeks to a month tbh, but clearly I don't come here to read 'worldly news'.

I’m glad that my attempts at removing USA politics from my content feeds have been so successful that this is the first time I hear about the Trump assassination attempt.

Don’t 7 year olds deserve to learn how to improve too? The comment doesn’t appear to be done aggressively or in bad faith, so what’s the issue? Presumably it will be the parent who’ll read the comment, and they can pass it on or not depending on what they think the kid would prefer and/or would let them grow.

Ironically, I find the most HN comments of all to be the ones who complain about something being too HN.

Which is not to say your comment wasn’t humorous, but let’s not be too quick to cast stones.

Unsolicited critique is almost always unwelcome critique, in my experience. Especially where someone else's 7 year old is concerned.

Respectfully, if you see the comment as critique, that’s on you. It could just as easily be described as “unsolicited advice” or “unsolicited tips”.

The communicator does have responsibility on how their message comes across, thought not all of it. It’s on the receiver to also make an effort to understand what was meant and not take unnecessary offence. The comment reads pretty much neutral, apart from a post scriptum which is explicitly about the author’s preference. It’s up to you to inject the writer’s feelings as either “this code sucks, here’s how you do it” or “congratulations on making something cool, here are a few suggestions”.

My experience is that life is much better if you take the latter approach. Default to empathy.

Consider listening to “This is Water” from David From Wallace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7xzavzEKY

Let's agree to disagree. I most certainly didn't take offense. I just disagreed (and continue to disagree) with the (your) comment that I responded to. I'm sure the parent of the 7 year old in question was aware of the shortcomings of the code. The fact that a (presumed) grown-up read the post/thread and their reaction was to provide a code review is odd to me and more than a little hackernews-ish which the poster you responded to poked fun at and which you seemed to take exception to.

Without n-gate around anymore there's literally no one who can

And still with all of that it completely serves its purpose

The dog page should be banned in the EU because it doesn’t disclose that the picture has been digitally altered, promoting impossible beauty standards for pets.

The concept of "Connection Before Correction" emphasizes creating a positive relationship and safe learning environment before addressing mistakes.

Connection and Correction - pair programming

Connection before Correction - code review

> The concept of "Connection Before Correction"

Oh hey, I learnt a new thing today!

It always felt apt to offer a few words of praise for the things that are good, or to establish common ground in code review before offering constructive critique.

Wouldn’t call it a must, but makes putting one’s own ego aside when receiving critique that much easier and lets me focus on improvement, I try to do that for others as well now!

> The dog is squeezed!

We talked about that, and she thought it looked better that way.

I agree.

could you replace it with a picture of her hugging a dog, and caption it "the dog is squeezed"?

> No need for / in HTML

I personally prefer having the /> even though it's not necessary, so that I can tell at-a-glance whether a tag is self-closing or not. It doesn't hurt, does it?

(plus I'm just used to it because the book I learned HTML from was confident that XHTML was the future)

I strongly believe that the harm we experienced from XHTML should not be passed down to future generations.

You didn't love the strict and unhelpful generic XML exception you got when you accidentally forgot to close a tag?

I thought the whole point of XML tags coming in named pairs was so you could be helpfully told which tag wasn't closed?

XHTML was a move by Big CMS to make edit-and-FTP error prone. Before that you rarely had to care whether the tag was closed.

Is this a joke? I genuinely can't tell.

Don't blame bad tools on the language.

I've always been completely baffled by the rejection of xhtml. It gave a way to extend html with new elements and a simple, powerful client side templating language with xslt. The "reason" for which I remember it being rejected was that allegedly web devs couldn't wrap their heads around closing tags and explicit attribute values, which seems crazy to me. Then a few years later typescript took off (which is way more complicated) and react gave a pretend way to write xml except now you need a compiler/build pipeline, and everyone loved it.

xhtml still works in modern browsers btw. It's still probably the easiest way to do page templates. XSLT shows its age without the ability to modify the page after load (unless you run it via javascript), but we could've just added that and it'd be almost perfect.

I reckon it does hurt, beyond the negligible cost of the extra transferred and parsed bytes: it teaches something that’s simply incorrect, and doesn’t do what people often think it does.

① The trailing slash doesn’t make a tag self-closing. All it does is get ignored, emitting a parse error (which in common compiler terms is just a warning) if you use it on a non-void tag.

You can’t use <div/>. You can’t use <custom-tag/>. The only tags you’re allowed to use the trailing slash on are the defined void tags like <img> and <br>.

It’s not “not necessary”, it’s “completely useless, by definition”.

I’ve seen people presume they can close tags this way. JSX probably helps cause this, because you can there. But because self-closing tags aren’t a thing in HTML syntax, I think it’s harmful to use the spelling at all in HTML syntax.

② I wouldn’t mind so much if people used it consistently, and I wouldn’t mind at all if it was being used to support both HTML and XML syntax, but if you see sites that use trailing slashes on void tags in their head, practically every time there will be at least one tag that isn’t using it:

  <link … />
  <meta … />
  <link …>
  <link … />

③ I also dislike it because it’s fairly common for syntax highlighters or other casual parsers to get it wrong. Most commonly, I’ve seen tools misinterpret an unquoted last attribute, treating <a href=/example/> as <a href="/example" /> rather than <a href="/example/"> before. (Same with the likes of <img src=/example/>, but anchor hrefs are more commonly going to look like that.)

IIRC, that's not necessarily true, some parsers "upgrade" html to xhtml and then process the xhtml since its more regular. html in general is a mess due to backwards compatibility requirements so trying to follow these kind of definitions imo is kinda pointless. you can optimize for size if you want but the decrease from these kind of optimizations with modern speeds is rather minimal

> some parsers "upgrade" html to xhtml and then process the xhtml since its more regular.

I have never heard of anything even vaguely matching your description, and it would be wildly wrong. HTML parsing is exhaustively defined, and the only way of correctly parsing HTML is to use the defined HTML parser.

  the dog is squeezed!

Her page, her squeezed dog !

Is this code review indicating a 7 year old will be put on a PIP?

While most of th 7 year olds contemporaries are busy consuming content instead of creating it like this?

Not a bad looking website. I like it better than most of that responsive CSS/JS bloated nightmares out there. I wish more websites were faster loading like this one.

try searching with https://teclis.com/ ...

Just type in some word like "cat" and click on the links. They are kinda all like that.

This is a fantastic website. Thanks for the link!

The web is a lot like music and movies. There's the mainstream pop stuff and then there's the other 99.99% which is easy to forget unless you are intentional about engaging it

I entered "mercedes w204" and found bloated stuff

I think the true filter, in practice, is to filter out sites with spyware or adware.

This tends towards cleaner sites and really it's the only stable fix for SEO spam

Steady on. In what conceivable way is a few lines of CSS comparable to a ream of JS?

Wonder why for such a cute and clean website, uMatrix is showing cloudlflareinsights.com blocked? On the off chance that a 7 year old isn't interested in website traffic analytics, is it Cloudflare injecting their shit?

Websites hosted on Cloudflare Pages include Cloudflare's own analytics iirc.

You can turn on MITM html injection of Cloudflare analytics for proxied sites.

[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/analytics/web-analytics/ge...

Cute page but what's the cloudflare analytics for

The page is not responsive... /s

Jokes aside, impressive for a 7 years old!

More soul than 98% of the current internet out there

Cloudflare Page Analytics Beacon without asking for my consent first.

Hopefully she has a heavy piggybank for my incoming GDPR lawsuit /s

This should not be on HN, esp not front page.

We took a vote and decided it should be at the front.

7 years old? Don't force kids If you need your kid to be kid. Hand coding HTML is just trash than collecting leaves & beautify the kindergarden book.

I've no memory for last 10+ years other than computer and programming. All I've pretty beautiful memory from childhood.

Maybe the kid likes to learn about computers and there’s enough time to do both.

I've not seen any gentle pups either elephant cubs. Kids are universally same even in all species. But may be.

HTML is fine to lean to code by hand.

Tags can provide clear starts and ends for beginners, as well as concepts of nesting.

Folks who learned to code HTML using a wysiwyg html editor may be able to describe how it helped them learn.

Yes correct, it's a good startup but 7 years was too kid. At least 12 years is fine. Kids life are so different, joyful, curious, etc. Any kid will be come adult to learn code or do whatever work.

Programming isn't big deal any old age man can do programming. Anyone can learn programming at any age. But kids life never come back.

At least teaching standard mathamatics like bits and bytes with abacus can be acceptable. It might be helpful to improve the math skill along with their school syllabus. Math is universally standard. Math actually improves our lifestyle.

But programming is just text format that a engineer designed. A well designed IDE with voice assist can replace all kind of programming.

What if building things with computers felt like magic?

Programming as a kid or teenager wasn’t work. It’s fun. It’s a challenge. It’s a sense of accomplishment if you do something that you didn’t know how to do.

7 can seem young to me too but I also know kids these days seem different and if they are naturally into something… can’t say much.

Even kids with little to no screen time are sponges and there’s so much more to stimulate them.

I have great memories of using computers as a little child, including tinkering with html and beginner css. I would never trade them for collecting leaves.

Your feelings are not universal.

Those are virtual, don't lie that you was felt it. Photo studios in india still using CRT monitor for setting colours because they don't feel/recogonize correct colours in LCD/LED.

Kids are universal even in all species. I can do those tinkering work in my old age which one you did in your golden age. Apart from the shake of argument, I'm really sorry for your loss :(

How dare you be so judgemental. Saying that you are sorry for my childhood is incredibly offensive.

And no, children are definitely NOT universal in the sense you say. They have very different personalities and interests from a very very young age.

> I've no memory for last 10+ years other than computer and programming.

If you are saying this in a negative light, you should really work on changing that. Try finding things local to you that you can participate in.

Yes, I'm frustrated of me doing it. I am working for the change.

What makes you think they were forced? Or doesn't spend the rest of their time collecting leaves? You know nothing of this family.

Kids are universal. I've met some parents with their kid asking me to tech them something. I can see they are not interested at all. All I've seen is their parent just forcing them.

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