Pointless, HTML

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This is not a rant, just want to see if people agree with my thoughts.

These challenges are just getting repetitive.

Seriously? Make a clock? I easily made the code that can count down from any given time in about 30 minutes.

There is nothing ground breaking between each project. Its all things you can do and were given to you because they were easy and possible.

The thing is i get mostly unmotivated when it comes to resizing in HTML. I just don’t feel like wasting hours of my time for a 50 line JS program because there is nothing out there for auto resizing. Bootstrap is useless when it has a 200 pixel difference between column sizes. There’s nothing fluent, and it might work on Large for one screen size and, still on large, look bad on another.

Oh great doesn’t look good on mobile.

But really, does anyone use mobile for anything besides mobile made apps and a couple different websites? Even professional websites don’t look good on mobile, extreme buffering. I’v never used my phone to surf the web.

Nothing about HTML requires logic, just memorization. I hate English & history class since its all memorization, nothing you could logically think through.

Just because you know all the painting techniques, doesn’t make you a good painter.

Designing HTML has always been hard. I’m just not creative enough to think of a good design. I do strive to improve though, and i have a little.

I set pretty low standards when reviewing others projects. Are people incapable of understanding that putting the same obnoxious bright neon color everywhere does not look good? Or that weather has no connection to color. I don’t think of purple or blue when its raining?

Is HTML weak spot if your not good at art?

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In all fairness, I find this …

These challenges are just getting repetitive. … Nothing about HTML requires logic, just memorization.

and this line …

Designing HTML has always been hard.

ironically in conflict.

Repetition is the key learning. The more complex the task, the more repetition. I’d rather spend a few months repeating it here than spend a career of having to look it up and try and fail and waste a lot of time.

HTML and CSS aren’t fun and they aren’t “sexy”. Everyone wants to learn cool libraries and frameworks. But it’s often the fundamentals that separate the wheat from the chaff.

But really, does anyone use mobile for anything besides mobile made apps and a couple different websites?

You’re joking, right? I think every web site needs to have some mobile ready design. The old way of doing that was to have a separate site for mobile. A more modern approach is a site that scales and adjusts. As people become more and more dependent on mobile, the need for mobile responsive apps is going to increase, not decrease.

As an example, I’ve had about half a dozen coding interviews. I’ve usually been praised for my JS/React/Redux/Node. Where did the ding me? HTML and CSS. The boring parts. Want to guess what I’ve been devoting extra time to studying?

I hate English & history class since its all memorization,

It’s funny that you mention history. People think history is memorization. No, history is debating and research and solving mysteries and arguing. The beginning of history is a lot of memorization, but unless they make it to grad school, that’s all people see. But you have to memorize a lot of stuff to get to that point.

As I’ve mentioned I’m a guitar teacher. A lot of people (especially jazz students) complain about practicing scales. Especially jazz students, it’s scales, arpeggios, scales, technique, scales, transcription, scales, chord voicing, and more scales. I tell them the point of practicing scales is so you don’t have to think about them when you’re playing. I would say the same thing about HTML/CSS - the point of learning them well (through repetition, unless you’ve invented a better way to learn) is so you won’t get bogged down with thinking about them later.

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The number of fields to which this advice applies is, AFAIK, limitless. As my fourth-degree black belt Tae Kwon Do instructor once told me when I discovered he went to training: “You can always improve your roundhouse.” (The first kick he taught us.)

I can personally attest that I was apprehensive about starting over in the Beta after doing 232 lessons and two Bootstrap-based projects in the production version. I also refuse to copy/paste, even almost-identical code. My learning has benefitted tremendously. One cannot dance to express oneself if one doesn’t know the steps. And one only learns that with repetition. In the words of the “Silver Ninja Master”: Go Practice!

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Every challenge is so different that its hard to even find a style.You need to build this one way, need to build this another, etc.

As i said earlier, i wouldn’t mind as long as i didn’t have to resize. Bootstrap is annoyingly bad, and its the only thing i really see out there. I know there is CSS grids, but i’m not going to spend hours watching tutorials on YouTube. People either drag them out to 30 minutes, or act like we have never coded before and spend most of the time teaching the basics of HTML.

Than they apply there concept they are teaching on something really basic, like two boxes.

Every HTML is so different that its hard to even apply concepts across them. They also all get broken in different ways by resizing.

As i am very annoyed at HTML, i am still doing the projects as i do this. I just want to know if i’m missing something.

No? I thought browsing the web on a phone is a joke. You really can’t see much, and everything takes forever to load. What makes it worse is the really ‘laggy’ ads that just cause it to crash.

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Honestly, I found this a bit unfair. When I first found FCC I thought I was very lucky to happen upon a completely free course that could introduce me to mostly all basics of web development. There are several things I think need to be considered when judging this course:

  • It is made for people of all walks, whether you have no programming experience or even not finished your education. It is aimed to teach coding to the widest array of people.

-It’s free, which means the developers working at it don’t get paid for it. They are doing it to help newbies like us get into the business.

-It aims to introduce you to the subject, not to train you in-depth in it.

-It is probably the most organised free course out there. Other courses I have seen, either charge for a ‘pro’ version to advance or have very little organisation on their study plan.

Seriously? Make a clock? I easily made the code that can count down from any given time in about 30 minutes.

Maybe you have a lot more work behind you, maybe it was because I was doing the beta version which requires your program to pass their tests, but I didn’t know where to start here until I found the setInterval method.

Demanding projects to be groundbreaking it’s a bit excessive. What I am looking for the most is to finish the projects and be able to work on my own ideas for my portfolio. If you think they are too easy you definitely should move on and create your own original work.

As far as resizing, I actually know several people that don’t even own a pc or laptop, all their internet usage is based on their phone or tablets. From what I keep reading, more and more companies want ‘one website suits it all’ so all devices are covered with just one much easier to maintain file, rather than several different files.

As far as HTML, what I guess is that companies will throw newbies all the HTML promotional emails to be made. Sure it should be easy to make, but how quick are you at making them? Without having worked as a dev yet, I would assume any company would expect anyone new employee to be at least quick when delivering promotional HTML emails and avoiding the back and forth on what can and can’t be done.

It might not be logical but HTML seems to play a big role in search engine tools. The element you use as well as ids, titles, alts… could be important if the client you are working for wants to be top of the list on google.

You should really reconsider this, especially with CSS. The number of methods and properties CSS has is almost overwhelming and being familiar with them can really shorten the time you spend editing a webpage, as well as being a really powerful tool that can do plenty without even a line of JS.

If you are bored of Bootstrap, have a look at CSS grid, It can make great responsive designs for all devices with very few limitations. Hopefully, it will eventually take over Bootstrap and be a sought-after skill.

One thing that I do agree with you is that user would definitely benefit from user experience training and probably some basic design and colour theory. Although we are training to be developers, our work is first seen and then read as code, so it should be important how it looks as well as how well it is written.

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I can’t tell you how many times I’m out and about and check a website on my phone and about…I’d say 7 out of 10 are designed to work on mobile. At this point in time that should be 10 out of 10. There’s no excuse not to have a mobile version of your website. Now, does every single person with a phone use it to surf the web? No. But a heck of a lot of them do.

Check out Hobo https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/best-screen-size/ they’ve been my go to for what screen resolutions to focus on. Look at the top listing there “360×640 – 21.54%” that’s a phone res. On top of that Google made a huge push a while ago that every website must be mobile friendly or otherwise it would be buried during searches. You could make the argument that maybe some folk don’t use Google as their main search engine, but that still doesn’t mean they don’t surf with their phone or tablet. Regardless any site or app you build has to be responsive.

If it makes you feel any better I honestly don’t dig Bootstrap either from what I’ve messed around with. But then again I’m used to doing this stuff the old fashioned way by calculating my own percents and using media queries. Check out A List Apart, Ethan is like one of the fathers of responsive design and that’s where I first learned the technique mentioned above. He even wrote a book about it, which I’ve owned for a long time now.

Also have you tried flexbox just on its own and not through Bootstrap? You’ve got way better control over sizes and flow. I’ve been making it a point to learn it myself.

That’s pretty much every project you’d encounter doing this for a living. Especially if you’re going to freelance. No two clients want the exact same thing. You might be able to canabalize your own code from a previous project here and there but at the end of the day your job is to deliver them something unique and suited for their needs. Every project is going to be different and you’re going to have to build them one way or another.

I hear ya, the design aspect of development is hard. I struggle with it myself. Luckily I’ve got a best friend that’s a graphic designer by trade that I can run things by. But even if you don’t, you’ve got a wealth of design inspiration at your fingertips. See a design aspect you dig? Figure out how it’s made and make it your own. I’m not talking about taking graphics or images mind you. I’m saying look at how the coding of it was done and learn from that. Like for example, who knows who came up with the first sticky nav bar, but designers and developers have been using them on their websites for a while now.

That being said I do wish there was a graphic design concept/best practices section on FCC, but I get it. This is all geared with the development end in mind. But look around the web, there are lots of tutorials on working specifically with designing site/app layouts:

That one is a bit more specific. I don’t have access to Sketch myself BUT, I really liked the way she broke down her design piece by piece and most importantly why she did something a certain way.

I’ve got a web design folder of bookmarks along with a web development one. I can tell ya right now the web dev one has waaaaay more bookmarks in it but, unless you’re going to be working with a graphic designer on projects, I think it’s important to familiarize yourself with some design practices (especially current ones).

Seriously with html/css/js the sky’s the limit. The only thing hindering you is you. If web design is giving you the run around and you really want to tackle it yourself then go for it man! Study layouts, practice, get creative, take some web design classes and learn about color, layout, fonts, UI’s, etc. Pair that with good old responsive coding and you’re the god of the web :laughing:

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Just take a look at tailwind.

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I forgot to add two things in reply to your original post:

  1. Ditch bootstrap and jQuery, get your hands dirty with raw HTML/CSS/JS. HTML 5, CSS3, and ES6 to be precise. While you may need to be able to support legacy browsers, you can always backfill that knowledge and instead harness the power of the newer versions.

  2. Mobile first: You’re just wrong about this. I suggest you read this article. The first part is great, then it becomes an ad for their services. Note that all the growth in internet use between 2010-5 was on mobile alone.. From that article, this graph:

    image
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    Beyond the lean-and-functional benefits of building out functionality progressively from more limited devices (progressive advancement), you also are forgetting sales funnels. How most users will find you is mobile. Portable search is the killer app of the mobile web. Google in your pocket has changed the internet from the realm of “nerds” to an everyday thing. Some of those who find you with mobile search will use your mobile site. Some of those who use your mobile site will go on to your use your fuller-featured PC site. If that offers more opportunity to present ads, or to sell product, then you have succeeded. But, for a funnel to work, the mouth has to be wide open, accepting of all users on small devices with limited bandwidth, no hover events, and who can use your app while almost anywhere, doing anything (not just at a place where they can use a laptop).

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Phones are the future. You sound like people in the 90s that refused to accept that the Internet would all but destroy newspapers.

I’m not saying that phones will completely replace computer screens for viewing the net, but that any site that looks like crap on a phone is going to loose business. If you do that for long enough, you go out of business.

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You seriously think think this? Mobile is how the majority of people consume the web. Also the ads thing - you just block them, most people get this now, that’s why Chrome had to cave and include an adblocker as part of the browser.

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It sounds like you would really hate being a front end developer.

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Yeah, as Ariel says, maybe FE isn’t for you. If you really like JS, maybe focus on BE, being a Node developer. But even most BE guys are expected to know at least a little bit of FE.

Listening to this is like listening to someone learning to be a chef and saying, “I love cooking, but I hate ovens and don’t want to learn to cook anything in them.” Could he become a chef? Sure. Is anyone going to hire them?

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After reading all of this, ill make my webpages more responsive for moble.

@kevinSmith @ArielLeslie
Guys i do like it, i just don’t like some parts- which is really just resizing. I was still doing HTML today as everyone was replying.

I really do like doing JS though, that is my favorite part of web development.

@sorinr

Tailwind looks cool, ill try it.

@vipatron

That is not considering what your searching. People only really use a select few websites on a daily basis. I started using my phone a lot because i don’t always have my computer on me.

@dlyons

Where do you get ideas for designs (besides your friend)

@MarioLema

I do appreciate people who did work on FCC. It seems like from all of these phones are the future. Id rather have holograms though.

I do agree this website is much better then any other out there. It is free, and its no game either.

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Well, as I tell my students, the parts you hate the most are the parts at which you need to work the hardest. First of all, we tend to avoid things we don’t like. And often we don’t like them because we aren’t good at them. Take your weaknesses and turn them into strengths.

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Easier said then done with turning weaknesses into strengths.

My weaknesses are:

Thinking of a good design.

Resizing

Good work schedule

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That is 100% my point. You, a dedicated desktop user (apparently), have understood the benefits of mobile computing. Now imagine all those people who use a phone as their primary computer (especially with the ubiquity of social media apps). I don’t know how many people use both (like I do). However, I just googled this, and it proves my point (from 2016, and I can only infer it’s gone up in 2 years - Linux, thanks to Android, is now the most popular OS in the world.)

image
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That’s a huge fraction of the market right now. A basic web page should absolutely reach these people. And even if you say, “Oh, well, my app requires the desktop, so i don’t need mobile users.” What if a few minutes of coding gave them a great experience so when they checked their phone between meetings, they found you (and the rest was so slick that the desktop-only components drew them to visit when they had access)? Given that up through a bad mobile impression is suicidal for a business.

Also, and as person trained in 1987 by Apple’s User Interface Guidelines, the greatest reason to build responsive mobile-first pages was found as a throwaway comment in this video on css grids: That’s the best way to deal with people on old computers (governments, institutional setups STILL running XP, etc) - just given them the minimalist mobile experience. Don’t worry about designing for IE - just give those users the mobile experience, and you cover your bases. Hope I’ve opened your eyes to the real state of the user base.

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Easier said then done with turning weaknesses into strengths.

Of course, but that’s what successful people do.

I had a friend in college, a fellow jazz guitarist. He had some weaknesses as a player, but some things he did well were tone and phrasing. Those were fun for him - so he worked on them obsessively. He never addressed his weaknesses. He just worked on his strengths. That’s why he never developed as a player and is a bar tender now.

I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m saying it’s a recipe for success. If you really want to be a dev, what are you willing to do?

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Thinking of a good design.

How do you design your site?

Do you open your code editor and start writing HTML and CSS code?

Well… that will be like a builder wanting to build a house and the first thing he does is start hammering pieces of wood together and hoping a big beautiful pretty house comes out of it.

Yeah, he could probably build “something” if his approach is like that… but would it be solid? well thought? easy to maintain? Pretty? Probably not.

So before building, ask yourself – Where are your working plans? Where’s your blueprint? Where’s your sketch? Where’s your specifications? Do you know beforehand the text height of your different Hx title tags? Do you know how much margin or padding you need for each element of your design? Do you know the exact color code for your different design elements? Do you know the exact dimensions beforehand?

No???

If you don’t have these things, then you’re planning to fail. You don’t have a design roadmap, just flying by the seat of your pants. Add your inexperience, and yeah the results will be bad.

In the old days, the tool of choice was Photoshop and Illustrator.

But these are more general purpose tools… an easier to use tool will be XD or Sketch,

Now, we have XD

or Sketch

Resizing

Bootstrap makes this really a no-brainer.

And I don’t understand people who hate BS.

It’s like lemming mentality – “I want to be s a great web developer so I will hate on BS like other developers that bash Bootstrap that I read on their blogs.”

Look… Bootstrap is just Twitter’s “branding”. Underneath it all, it’s just plain CSS with % widths and media queries… so you don’t have to re-invent the wheel and re-create these media queries on your own.

And you don’t have to go with the BS color scheme. These can easily be overridden, or ignored by using your own classes for styling.

You need to really read the BS documentation and view the demo code on their documentation site.

And better yet, spend some time looking under the hood of Bootstrap CSS source code to really understand it.
There is no mystery. It’s just damn plain CSS. People who think BS is some voodoo magic and don’t understand it’s underlying CSS, are the same people that run into trouble using BS. Then they blame BS and conclude, it’s better for me to write my own CSS. No— you just don’t understand Bootstrap.

Also, it’s not a neither/or. It’s not Bootstrap -or- your own CSS. You can use/have both! And this saves a lot of time, letting the BS media queries do the responsive work, and your own custom CSS for your own styling/branding/colors.

For all I could care, someone could have called Bootstrap – Alligator CSS framework. It would still work the same. It’s just plain CSS underneath the “Bootstrap” branding.

– okay! Rant over :slight_smile:

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I don’t hate Bootstrap because of any of the reasons you stated. I fully understand how Bootstrap changed the game by making responsive design easy, and from an enterprise perspective, quick. However, the very same people who look underneath the hood of bootstrap.css are the kinds who don’t need all of its functionality, and so might want to be able to code that functionality on their own, more flexibly. Plus, all frameworks get left behind in time, so as a learner, I find it’s more important to get a solid handle on the fundamentals and decide in which framework to specialize later. I do care about speed, and I understand that caching can save on repeat loading times, but for first impressions, for the project I have in mind, I need the “wow/wait” ratio to be off the charts.
To your point about resizing: I mean, it’s not like bootstrap isn’t just rebranding flexbox initially and possibly grid in the future, but the “no-brainer” is a dead end for a student. I refactored all my first few projects from Bootstrap to plain CSS and I understood everything the more, so I speak from my experience. I am sure that to seasoned front-end devs, Bootstrap was a godsend when it came out. I also agree with you that much of the opinion pieces I read about on the web are very “religious” for lack of a better word. Except for jQuery. Those rants seem to agree with me about speed/file size.

Edit: to be clear, I 110% agree with the first half of your <rant>

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Well I don’t get ideas from her per say, I do however run what I have by her a lot of times and she’ll give me feedback and advice that’s immensely helpful.

As for where I get ideas, it depends on what I’m building. Let’s just say for the sake of an example I’ve been hired to make a website for a local coffee shop. My very first step is research. TONS OF RESEARCH. I’ll look at the coffee shop itself for inspiration (do they have a color scheme I could incorporate? A particular style? Like are they trendy? vintage?). I’ll also look up other coffee shop websites, study the things I like about them, look for things I don’t like about them that I might be able to improve on my project.

The thing that really dictates the project is what the client is looking for content and functionality-wise. The content itself more often then not will guide me on what should go where. Then I get out the tried and true pencil and a piece of paper and I start making wireframes, trying different layouts, moving stuff here and there, thinking about what the current layout I’m futzing with would look like condensed down to mobile and most importantly HOW I would go about getting it there. I think that really makes or breaks a design idea, if I can’t mentally code it and know exactly how it will work from point A (desktop) to point B (mobile) then the layout needs to be rethought.

There’s a ridiculous amount of research you can do into web marketing on what works and what doesn’t work with users. But to me a clean, modern looking site, that works everywhere is the goal. I’ll bookmark sites that I like pieces of, maybe it’s the way the navbar was done, maybe the way they did the text content, the images, the responsiveness of it. If you look at enough websites and apps you begin to see common trends and themes reused over and over. Pay attention to those themes and trends–they’re popular for a reason.

Edit: I wanted to mention that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with using Bootstrap. BS4 I have to say looks pretty nifty with the built-in flexbox stuff, but I personally haven’t had a need for it yet. I kinda liken BS to a swiss army knife. So I think with that in mind you can use as much or as little of it as you might need for any given project.

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