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Comment by mightybyte | Hacker News Reader

I think the fundamental approach being taken by this project is immensely valuable to the world. This kind of education about open standards might actually be the most powerful tool that can help us take steps in the direction away from giant opaque corporations and back towards the systems based on open standards that the internet originated from. I really hope this project continues to be updated and get more and more eyes and contributors. If you feel the same way, I'd say at least throw it a GitHub star. https://github.com/blakewatson/htmlforpeople

(Note: I have nothing to do with this project thus far and have nothing to gain from saying this.)

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Mozilla has amazing documentation that's been around for years.

Here's their basic html tutorial section: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML

No one is or has been stopping people from learning HTML.

Super approachable. (sure Jan meme.gif)

That’s the website my high school used in engineering sciences classes to give students an introduction to HTML. I don’t see the point of your comment (I think it’s sarcasm, but I’m not even sure), can you be a little bit more constructive?

The point may be that OP's guide is not meant for high school/engineering students, it is meant for everyone. MDN's "introductory" sections have too many big words to be of use to laypeople.

As a technical person who recently taught myself frontend from scratch, I found https://web.dev/learn way more structured and thorough. The CSS lesson covers all the essentials and actually made me enjoy working with CSS.

web.dev doesn't get as much love as MDN, but it totally should!

HTML for People is waaaay more approachable than this. My wife could follow the HTML for People tutorial. It shows you how to create a real web page in a real browser without first bogging you down in coding details.

The MDN tutorial is talking about img alt attributes before you even create a single .html file! That's how to put people off.

This is how I've been learning html + css. It's been fantastic and I treat it as THE docs for the web.

I'm very proud of my single file html document for reporting results.

Of course no JS!

I really hope so too. I really wonder what would happen if there was an alternative like... instead of spending X dozen hours learning how to use WordPress, or MS Word for that matter, people (in the general population) felt like spending those X dozen hours learning HTML was a viable and useful alternative to achieving their goals!

OP here. I appreciate the kind words. Yeah, I hope it finds its way into the hands of non-professionals.

Will you add on to it to include custom CSS, or maybe a section for using different CSS templates (and where to find them), to make a slightly larger website like your own (blakewatson.com)?

No I think I will probably keep it focused on HTML. I think my "CSS basics" chapter is as far as I want to go with styling. But I would love to see other folks publish easy-to-understand CSS tutorials.

::backdrop was useful to me. Right now I am learning the last two years of stuff, refreshing my frontend skills. Things like scoping are a dream come true.

I haven't got all the way through it, but seeing the contents drop-down made me feel at home.

I put document structure first so the content looks good with no styling and no class attributes. I use no divs, just the more sensible elements. Sections, Articles, Asides and Navs work for me. There should be headings at the start of these elements, optionally in a Header and optionally ending with a Footer. The main structure is Header - Main - Footer.

Really there should be a need to keep it simple, and that begins with the document structure. It is then possible with scoping to style the elements within a block without having to use any classes except for at the top of a block.

It infuriates me that we have gone the other way to make everything more and more complex. We have turned something everyone should be able to work with into an outsourced cottage industry. Nowadays the tool chain needed for frontend development is stupid and a true barrier to entry. Whenever you look under the hood there is nothing but bloat.

My approach requires strict adherence to a document structure, however, my HTML content is fully human readable and the content looks great without a stylesheet, albeit HTML 1.0 pre-Netscape looking.

Tim Berners Lee did not have class attributes in HTML 1.0 but he did want content sectioning. Now that there is CSS grid it is easy to style up a structured document. However, 'sea of divs' HTML requires 'display: contents' to massage the simplest of form to fit into a grid.

I feel that a guide is needed for experienced frontend developers that are still churning out 'sea of div' content. In the Mozilla guide for 'div' it says that it is the element of last resort. I never need the 'div' because there is always something better.

The CSS compilers are also redundant when working with scoping and structured content. Sadly my IDE is out of date so I have to put the scoping in at the end as it does not recognise @scope. Time to upgrade...

Anyway, brilliant guide, in the right direction and of great interest to me and my peculiar way of writing super neat content and styling.

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