14 ms·

Will you write HTML with us tomorrow?

153 points by cookingoils 5y ago

emodendroket 5y ago
I don't really understand the goal.
- mathgladiator 5y ago
  It looks like getting together to write HTML. Socially
- kleer001 5y ago
  IMHO it's to help support their podcast: http://html.energy/podcast.html http://html.energy/podcast.html Seems niche and fun to me. Not that I'll participate. I made a website once, never again.
  - kk6mrp 5y ago
    That bad?
    - kleer001 5y ago
      Thinking about it makes my RSI flare up. I'm probably just too much of a control freak to deal with the uncertainty of browser-craft. (All respect to those who do web stuff) I'm from a painterly background and do cgi. If I want a pixel somewhere I'll put it there.
      - movedx 5y ago
        Ironically if you stick to a certain set of the HTML, CSS and JS specs - and keep things simple - you'll never have to deal with browser-craft at all. Your code will just do the job of getting content rendered in a browser and it'll work on everything.
      - s_fischer 5y ago
        I think the entire point of this project is show people that they can make a website without having to be afraid of having the type of experience you just described. If you just use HTML, then the words that you choose to write will be the words that everyone will read. Any "pixel placement" is optional and shouldn't be a detering factor.
        kleer001 5y ago
        I did use plain html. This was back on '02. I meant 'pixel' as a synecdoche, to stand in for all the elements of computer art and visual craft.
victorbstan 5y ago
The right kind of energy.
toastedwedge 5y ago
I understand the reasoning for using Discord/Twitter, but wouldn't it also be beneficial to have Mastodon/Matrix channels alongside, given the "minimal/small tech" style feeling of the page?
- cookingoils 5y ago
  That's a great suggestion. Maybe we will create a Mastodon for the next one.
  - trevcanhuman 5y ago
    Maybe even an IRC chat with SSL support. There are discord bots that can sink the conversation between IRC/discord afaik.
    - movedx 5y ago
      But how many systems do we really need here, though? Where do you draw the line? Can I have an RSS feed that's updated automatically when someone says something in IRC? I'll just sub to the RSS feed, but only if it also converts the text into Markdown so I can... Why isn't Discord just enough? Or just IRC? Honestly I think this fragmentation that gets suggested is why a lot of projects fail; never stand the test of time: they try to be everything to everyone.
      - trevcanhuman 5y ago
        I agree but I honestly just don’t like discord. Most of the times I use it on my mobile and my computer it chugs resources like if there was no tomorrow. But this is just my opinion and yeah, it was just a suggestion, I wouldn’t have refused to join if it were only on Discord. Although for the event in question I was not able to attend because I overslept.
      - robertlagrant 5y ago
        Time to start chat.energy.
excalibur 5y ago
As much as everyone liked to rag on MySpace, there were valualble skills being taught. How much about web development has Facebook taught its average user?
- cookingoils 5y ago
  very true!
a1371 5y ago
HTML was originally envisioned as something extremely user-friendly to let people and companies customize their online presence. Nowadays multiple professional roles and software stacks are between the content and its HTML representation. It tells us something, but also regularly what's easy looks hard. I have organized some hackathons and coding events for students. Some start with create-react-app for showing an image. They are very hesitant to do things the "manual" way when I suggest it. I think it's awesome that vanilla gets to have a community like this.
- austincheney 5y ago
  Then they invented the DOM. I love the DOM but most developers would rather jump off a bridge than write some logic to walk a DOM. I have never understood why there is so much fear about the DOM, why that fear is so astonishingly prevalent, or the extremes people will go to in order to sidestep this phobia. So curious because this is a subject that takes about 2 hours to learn after which your career takes a different trajectory.
  - jerf 5y ago
    The DOM has double impedance mismatch written into its most basic foundations. It's an object oriented API to something that functional programming is much better for (functional programming loves manipulating trees recursively). And then, you're using Javascript to program it, a dynamic scripting language, but the DOM spec is heavily biased towards static C++ or Java, thus it simultaneously fails to take good advantage of the opportunities a dynamic language offers while also importing the verbosity and hoop jumping of 1990s statically-typed programming... and statically-typed programming has come a long way since then! You can see this most clearly in DOM 1.0: https://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-DOM-Level-1-19981001/level-one-core.html https://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-DOM-Level-1-19981001/level-on... Look particularly at the "IDL specifications". That's Java, not Javascript! Later versions have improved various elements of this, but the fundamental architecture is still there and still not looking much like what I would write down if I wanted to write out a similar system natively for Javascript, assuming this was still the 1990s and that meant I could also modify JS itself a bit. When you learn how to work around these impedance mismatches you can do some good work, but the resulting code may not make much sense to your coworker. Fortunately, even in native JS nowadays, .querySelector and similar APIs make it unnecessary to have to "walk" the DOM much anymore. I'd even argue you could cite the existence of a triple mismatch, in that the original DOM level 0, supported in Netscape 2.0, entirely precedes the idea of a writable DOM. (It wasn't until Netscape 4 that we got "layers", which were useless, and it was IE 4 that finally gave us manipulable DOMs as we know them today. [1]) So the standard that was originally written with the concept of introspection and largely read-only access (you could only write things that the browser could guarantee wouldn't require a reflow, and not necessarily all of those) got a lot of write access bodge onto it later. Historically, it's a huge mess. [1]: They didn't necessarily work the way we expect today for much longer than that, I crashed IE 4 a lot with stuff we'd consider trivial today, but it was the first browser to at least try presenting everything in the DOM as editable.
cookingoils 5y ago
Hi HN, Looking forward to writing HTML together tomorrow at 2PM EST. You can join our discord to share your writing/websites [1] during the freewrite. Also we just wanted to share a little more about HTML Energy. It’s still coming together but here are some of our big dreams… - Create a #web0 movement: We would love to see a new movement around web0 (coding HTML by hand, personal websites, webrings, etc). Basically anything that brings websites instead of platforms into the spotlight again. We are actually pretty inspired by all the energy that is going into web3 right now. What if that same energy and capital was going into web0? What could we create together? - Rebrand HTML [2]: Some people think that HTML is outdated or hard to use. We think it’s actually pretty straightforward and really powerful stuff. Stripping away all the paint (CSS/JS) really makes the content the focus and there's a raw sincerity to an unstyled page. Our goal is just to get people excited about learning & writing HTML and this is our attempt at making it "cool." - Getting HTML into schools: What if more people knew how to self host/publish? Would we depend on big platforms less? Would people begin making more small community websites to chat with their friends? - Create another season of our podcast [3]. Last season we talked with so many incredible people that are trying to make the web a better place. Let us know if you listened and would want another season. Hope to see you tomorrow and have a great night! <p>'s on earth! [1] https://discord.gg/SsPKzA8N?event=931711702578384947 https://discord.gg/SsPKzA8N?event=931711702578384947 [2] https://twitter.com/htmlenergy https://twitter.com/htmlenergy [3] https://html.energy/podcast.html https://html.energy/podcast.html
- andrethegiant 5y ago
  Is just a lil bit of JS allowed?
  - cookingoils 5y ago
    Sure! We understand that JavaScript and frameworks are nice to have but it feels like everyone depends on them too much these days. It would be pretty cool if someone that has never made a website before, learned a little HTML, wrote an index.html, and published it on the www. Maybe that person never learns CSS, JS, or any framework and that's totally fine. We think that the simplicity and directness of HTML is what makes it powerful.
astroalex 5y ago
There's something magical about writing raw HTML/CSS. Nostalgia must be part of it -- I'm guessing many self-taught programmers growing up in the late 90s/2000s started out by learning HTML/CSS before dabbling with JavaScript, Flash, PHP. It's also extremely satisfying to make a webpage with zero dependencies. No JS frameworks, no build processes; just a direct conversation between you and the Browser. That tight feedback loop is plain _fun_, especially for those of us who feel bogged down by modern software development. Finally, writing raw HTML/CSS aligns with the founding vision of the world wide web, in which individuals could independently create and host content without any technical barrier to entry or dependency on corporations. The age of the personal webpage is over and I think that vision of the web is mostly dead, but I'm happy to see people keeping the energy alive.
- cookingoils 5y ago
  Yes! That "direct conversation between you and the browser" is what we are calling HTML energy. > The age of the personal webpage is over and I think that vision of the web is mostly dead, but I'm happy to see people keeping the energy alive. Our hope is that a movement (web0 or whatever you want to call it) could bring this back.
chubot 5y ago
This feels a little like IndieWeb, but focused on HTML, which is nice. https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/
fmakunbound 5y ago
I like this web page. It is very readable. I wish more pages had this splendor. Perhaps it can be web3.
taubek 5y ago
I must say that I really enjoyed creating web sites back in the 90s. I was using UNIX terminals that didn0't have graphic capabilities. I was browsing web using lynx, I've create pages in vi, nano or joe. It was all about the content and quality of the content. There were no dark patterns, scams, no spam... Just the desire to get the information out there and to find other who felt the same.
tholdem 5y ago
What about websites that can be sent via email? Nested tables, inlined styles, code could be copied to HTML email and the single page website would display in an email client. Animations with marquee.
- s_fischer 5y ago
  I'm not sure if you've ever dabbled in HTML email development but I would definitely not recommend it as a starting point for learning basic HTML.
ipiz0618 5y ago
Cool! I miss writing plain htmls - no setup, no installs. Just open a text editor (Notepad!) and you can get started.
T3RMINATED 5y ago
ejanus 5y ago
Where can I get good tutorials on HTML and CSS?

153 points by cookingoils 5y ago

emodendroket 5y ago

I don't really understand the goal.

mathgladiator 5y ago
It looks like getting together to write HTML. Socially
kleer001 5y ago
IMHO it's to help support their podcast: http://html.energy/podcast.html http://html.energy/podcast.html Seems niche and fun to me. Not that I'll participate. I made a website once, never again.
- kk6mrp 5y ago
  That bad?
  - kleer001 5y ago
    Thinking about it makes my RSI flare up. I'm probably just too much of a control freak to deal with the uncertainty of browser-craft. (All respect to those who do web stuff) I'm from a painterly background and do cgi. If I want a pixel somewhere I'll put it there.
    - movedx 5y ago
      Ironically if you stick to a certain set of the HTML, CSS and JS specs - and keep things simple - you'll never have to deal with browser-craft at all. Your code will just do the job of getting content rendered in a browser and it'll work on everything.
    - s_fischer 5y ago
      I think the entire point of this project is show people that they can make a website without having to be afraid of having the type of experience you just described. If you just use HTML, then the words that you choose to write will be the words that everyone will read. Any "pixel placement" is optional and shouldn't be a detering factor.
      - kleer001 5y ago
        I did use plain html. This was back on '02. I meant 'pixel' as a synecdoche, to stand in for all the elements of computer art and visual craft.

victorbstan 5y ago

The right kind of energy.

toastedwedge 5y ago

I understand the reasoning for using Discord/Twitter, but wouldn't it also be beneficial to have Mastodon/Matrix channels alongside, given the "minimal/small tech" style feeling of the page?

cookingoils 5y ago
That's a great suggestion. Maybe we will create a Mastodon for the next one.
- trevcanhuman 5y ago
  Maybe even an IRC chat with SSL support. There are discord bots that can sink the conversation between IRC/discord afaik.
  - movedx 5y ago
    But how many systems do we really need here, though? Where do you draw the line? Can I have an RSS feed that's updated automatically when someone says something in IRC? I'll just sub to the RSS feed, but only if it also converts the text into Markdown so I can... Why isn't Discord just enough? Or just IRC? Honestly I think this fragmentation that gets suggested is why a lot of projects fail; never stand the test of time: they try to be everything to everyone.
    - trevcanhuman 5y ago
      I agree but I honestly just don’t like discord. Most of the times I use it on my mobile and my computer it chugs resources like if there was no tomorrow. But this is just my opinion and yeah, it was just a suggestion, I wouldn’t have refused to join if it were only on Discord. Although for the event in question I was not able to attend because I overslept.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      Time to start chat.energy.

excalibur 5y ago

As much as everyone liked to rag on MySpace, there were valualble skills being taught. How much about web development has Facebook taught its average user?

cookingoils 5y ago
very true!

a1371 5y ago

HTML was originally envisioned as something extremely user-friendly to let people and companies customize their online presence. Nowadays multiple professional roles and software stacks are between the content and its HTML representation. It tells us something, but also regularly what's easy looks hard. I have organized some hackathons and coding events for students. Some start with create-react-app for showing an image. They are very hesitant to do things the "manual" way when I suggest it. I think it's awesome that vanilla gets to have a community like this.

austincheney 5y ago
Then they invented the DOM. I love the DOM but most developers would rather jump off a bridge than write some logic to walk a DOM. I have never understood why there is so much fear about the DOM, why that fear is so astonishingly prevalent, or the extremes people will go to in order to sidestep this phobia. So curious because this is a subject that takes about 2 hours to learn after which your career takes a different trajectory.
- jerf 5y ago
  The DOM has double impedance mismatch written into its most basic foundations. It's an object oriented API to something that functional programming is much better for (functional programming loves manipulating trees recursively). And then, you're using Javascript to program it, a dynamic scripting language, but the DOM spec is heavily biased towards static C++ or Java, thus it simultaneously fails to take good advantage of the opportunities a dynamic language offers while also importing the verbosity and hoop jumping of 1990s statically-typed programming... and statically-typed programming has come a long way since then! You can see this most clearly in DOM 1.0: https://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-DOM-Level-1-19981001/level-one-core.html https://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-DOM-Level-1-19981001/level-on... Look particularly at the "IDL specifications". That's Java, not Javascript! Later versions have improved various elements of this, but the fundamental architecture is still there and still not looking much like what I would write down if I wanted to write out a similar system natively for Javascript, assuming this was still the 1990s and that meant I could also modify JS itself a bit. When you learn how to work around these impedance mismatches you can do some good work, but the resulting code may not make much sense to your coworker. Fortunately, even in native JS nowadays, .querySelector and similar APIs make it unnecessary to have to "walk" the DOM much anymore. I'd even argue you could cite the existence of a triple mismatch, in that the original DOM level 0, supported in Netscape 2.0, entirely precedes the idea of a writable DOM. (It wasn't until Netscape 4 that we got "layers", which were useless, and it was IE 4 that finally gave us manipulable DOMs as we know them today. [1]) So the standard that was originally written with the concept of introspection and largely read-only access (you could only write things that the browser could guarantee wouldn't require a reflow, and not necessarily all of those) got a lot of write access bodge onto it later. Historically, it's a huge mess. [1]: They didn't necessarily work the way we expect today for much longer than that, I crashed IE 4 a lot with stuff we'd consider trivial today, but it was the first browser to at least try presenting everything in the DOM as editable.

cookingoils 5y ago

Hi HN, Looking forward to writing HTML together tomorrow at 2PM EST. You can join our discord to share your writing/websites [1] during the freewrite. Also we just wanted to share a little more about HTML Energy. It’s still coming together but here are some of our big dreams… - Create a #web0 movement: We would love to see a new movement around web0 (coding HTML by hand, personal websites, webrings, etc). Basically anything that brings websites instead of platforms into the spotlight again. We are actually pretty inspired by all the energy that is going into web3 right now. What if that same energy and capital was going into web0? What could we create together? - Rebrand HTML [2]: Some people think that HTML is outdated or hard to use. We think it’s actually pretty straightforward and really powerful stuff. Stripping away all the paint (CSS/JS) really makes the content the focus and there's a raw sincerity to an unstyled page. Our goal is just to get people excited about learning & writing HTML and this is our attempt at making it "cool." - Getting HTML into schools: What if more people knew how to self host/publish? Would we depend on big platforms less? Would people begin making more small community websites to chat with their friends? - Create another season of our podcast [3]. Last season we talked with so many incredible people that are trying to make the web a better place. Let us know if you listened and would want another season. Hope to see you tomorrow and have a great night! <p>'s on earth! [1] https://discord.gg/SsPKzA8N?event=931711702578384947 https://discord.gg/SsPKzA8N?event=931711702578384947 [2] https://twitter.com/htmlenergy https://twitter.com/htmlenergy [3] https://html.energy/podcast.html https://html.energy/podcast.html

andrethegiant 5y ago
Is just a lil bit of JS allowed?
- cookingoils 5y ago
  Sure! We understand that JavaScript and frameworks are nice to have but it feels like everyone depends on them too much these days. It would be pretty cool if someone that has never made a website before, learned a little HTML, wrote an index.html, and published it on the www. Maybe that person never learns CSS, JS, or any framework and that's totally fine. We think that the simplicity and directness of HTML is what makes it powerful.

astroalex 5y ago

There's something magical about writing raw HTML/CSS. Nostalgia must be part of it -- I'm guessing many self-taught programmers growing up in the late 90s/2000s started out by learning HTML/CSS before dabbling with JavaScript, Flash, PHP. It's also extremely satisfying to make a webpage with zero dependencies. No JS frameworks, no build processes; just a direct conversation between you and the Browser. That tight feedback loop is plain _fun_, especially for those of us who feel bogged down by modern software development. Finally, writing raw HTML/CSS aligns with the founding vision of the world wide web, in which individuals could independently create and host content without any technical barrier to entry or dependency on corporations. The age of the personal webpage is over and I think that vision of the web is mostly dead, but I'm happy to see people keeping the energy alive.

cookingoils 5y ago
Yes! That "direct conversation between you and the browser" is what we are calling HTML energy. > The age of the personal webpage is over and I think that vision of the web is mostly dead, but I'm happy to see people keeping the energy alive. Our hope is that a movement (web0 or whatever you want to call it) could bring this back.

chubot 5y ago

This feels a little like IndieWeb, but focused on HTML, which is nice. https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/

fmakunbound 5y ago

I like this web page. It is very readable. I wish more pages had this splendor. Perhaps it can be web3.

taubek 5y ago

I must say that I really enjoyed creating web sites back in the 90s. I was using UNIX terminals that didn0't have graphic capabilities. I was browsing web using lynx, I've create pages in vi, nano or joe. It was all about the content and quality of the content. There were no dark patterns, scams, no spam... Just the desire to get the information out there and to find other who felt the same.

tholdem 5y ago

What about websites that can be sent via email? Nested tables, inlined styles, code could be copied to HTML email and the single page website would display in an email client. Animations with marquee.

s_fischer 5y ago
I'm not sure if you've ever dabbled in HTML email development but I would definitely not recommend it as a starting point for learning basic HTML.

ipiz0618 5y ago

Cool! I miss writing plain htmls - no setup, no installs. Just open a text editor (Notepad!) and you can get started.

T3RMINATED 5y ago

ejanus 5y ago

Where can I get good tutorials on HTML and CSS?