Comment by vibrunazo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vibrunazo | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

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

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

> and still succeeds in being,

The BOK for HTML5 is larger than what professionals have time for, and is definitely a deeper delve than HTML4.

You know, I waited too long for the right higher level layer or even outright replacement for html/javascript to come along and rise in popularity. Now I wish I'd just dived in to plain html/javascript earlier and become adept with them just as they were. A lot of "higher level" layers have come and gone, while javascript and html are still with us, and getting stronger all the time. What's more even with a higher level layer above them, you're going to have to know them anyway, to use them in real projects.

What are you actually suggesting here? What is the "higher abstraction layer" you think people should be learning instead?

> This is like trying to get more kids to program by trying to show them how easy and fun assembly language is.

Doesn't this way make sense if you are a manufacturer of microcontrollers, for example?

Of course, this is why I said it seems they're confused about their target. Their website and learning method seems designed for kids with zero technical knowledge. But the content material seems designed for manufacturers of microcontrollers. Who is this for? Something doesn't match.

I wish people who have written HTML for years would play around with this if for no other reason then to learn what all the new semantics of HTML5 are.

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