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>Is this really true My answer is 'no'. I think it's hard to make a living as a html/css website builder. You're competing with students, foreign freelancers,

>Is this really true My answer is 'no'. I think it's hard to make a living as a html/css website builder. You're competing with students, foreign freelancers, Web CMSes (like Wordpress+themes), and Website builder services (like Squarespace) ... all of which can, in one way or the other, undercut you. >you need to install 10k dependencies for a brochure site. You don't need 10k dependencies for a brochure site. Things like Wordpress or Squarespace should be more than enough.

acdha 8y ago
> You don't need 10k dependencies for a brochure site. Things like Wordpress or Squarespace should be more than enough. I agree but say you want to create a simple site for something like a restaurant. You read all of the advice saying to use create-react-app and now you have 37,646 dependencies. That gives you a lot of tools but many of them are there to reduce the downsides to having that much complexity in the first place. It's certainly not a simple good-bad call but I do think it's right to ask about barriers to entry and whether we're entirely comfortable with the trade-offs.
- macspoofing 8y ago
  I think I agree. You don't need to setup an entire modern javascript build-chain in order to build a simple site, and if that's the advice that they received, it was bad advice. Having said that, 1) HTML/CSS even outside of any JS is complicated, and website builders are probably a better approach, and 2) all those JS-based frameworks are there for building web-applications, not web-sites and therefore geared towards solving programming problems (like how to organize and maintain thousands of lines of code).
wccrawford 8y ago
I was talking about "industry entry points" not "long term careers". Yeah, it's probably harder to have an entire career on html and css unless you're also a really good artist. But for getting your foot into the industry, you've already said it: Plenty of students are doing it.

acdha 8y ago

> You don't need 10k dependencies for a brochure site. Things like Wordpress or Squarespace should be more than enough. I agree but say you want to create a simple site for something like a restaurant. You read all of the advice saying to use create-react-app and now you have 37,646 dependencies. That gives you a lot of tools but many of them are there to reduce the downsides to having that much complexity in the first place. It's certainly not a simple good-bad call but I do think it's right to ask about barriers to entry and whether we're entirely comfortable with the trade-offs.

macspoofing 8y ago
I think I agree. You don't need to setup an entire modern javascript build-chain in order to build a simple site, and if that's the advice that they received, it was bad advice. Having said that, 1) HTML/CSS even outside of any JS is complicated, and website builders are probably a better approach, and 2) all those JS-based frameworks are there for building web-applications, not web-sites and therefore geared towards solving programming problems (like how to organize and maintain thousands of lines of code).

wccrawford 8y ago

I was talking about "industry entry points" not "long term careers". Yeah, it's probably harder to have an entire career on html and css unless you're also a really good artist. But for getting your foot into the industry, you've already said it: Plenty of students are doing it.