5 ms·
You can still just use HTML.
by fartcannon 4y ago
You can still just use HTML.
- diamondo25 4y agoAt least the doctype is simple nowadays. The XHTML one was horrendous.
- laristine 4y agoHorrendous yes, but it was necessary, because without it we wouldn't have had the nice doctype HTML5 today. It addressed a lot of problems found in the early html and paved way for standardization and a path forward.
- jerf 4y agoThis does indeed work fine. The major problem is still finding somewhere to host it, and incurring the still non-trivial risks thereto, since among the many things students want to do with free web space, hosting warez and other things that will get you in trouble quickly is still pretty far up the list. Plus someone has to pay for a domain name or something. If you can get a modern text editor that can use SSH or something to mount a remote directory you can easily have an HTML party like it's 1999. That's easier than ever. But the surrounding issues are worse than they were in 1999, unfortunately.
- eli 4y agoIt's never been easier to host a webpage than it is today. You can host 100s of student sites on a $5/month VPS. The free tier of AWS/GCP/etc are extremely capable. There are free services like Wix and Glitch that let you build a webpage and then mess with the HTML, no domain name needed. The problem of warez is certainly no worse than it was 30 years ago, and there are much better tools to address it. A simple storage quota probably goes a long way.
- sph 4y agoSigning up to and using AWS or GCP is orders of magnitude more complex than those old free hosting services where you got an FTP username and a password. In fact you could upload directly from Frontpage IIRC, but I could never get it to work. It's simpler for us software engineers, less simple for the snot-nosed webmaster wannabes we were.
- 411111111111111 4y agoThank goodness you don't need to do any of that then. If all you want is to host static html, then any free hosting service will suffice. I.e. let them create a GitHub account and show them git add / git commit / git push and you're done.
- fartcannon 4y agoIf you can use git, you can run a webserver. It's all just right there waiting for you.
- eli 4y agoThat's because someone did the work of setting up a server for you, configuring the services, and issuing FTP credentials. That part is now a whole lot cheaper and easier and more secure. It doesn't get much easier than signing up for e.g. Glitch.
- fartcannon 4y agoSetting up a server is so unbelievably simple that anyone capable of writing software shouldn't blink at the task. The fact that there's a lot of blinking strikes me as profoundly funny.
- WaffleIronMaker 4y agoI mean, it isn't? Even the simple matter of port forwarding assumes you have access to the router you're using, and that's a major barrier for a lot of people. I run the programming club at my high school (I'm a high schooler), and we use Github pages to host all of our stuff for this very reason. I've used some old laptops to run servers within the network, but my school doesn't want us hosting anything public, and running everything through a free tunneling service like localtunnel is possible, but it scales so much better when students can just follow some friendly instructions to host a static site themselves. It's not hard for the people with the privileges of (1) having a budget > $0 and (2) not having the adults tell you 'no' every time you want to try learn something. Am I missing something? Even hosting static content on a server seems like a layer of complexity that is frequently unnecessary for basic use-cases.
- laptop-man 4y agonetlify for free static hosting. dirt simple no cc decent free teir
- sporedro 4y agoI think there’s quite a lot of options for static webpages now though. Would GitHub pages not be perfect for this?
- fartcannon 4y agoYeah github pages is basically GeoCities with a little extra data farming by Microsoft. Works fine, if you don't mind that.
- mrlemke 4y agoHuh? Just use neocities.org. Even has a built-in editor on the site.
- sph 4y agoHN knows neocities, everybody used to know Geocities once. How's one supposed to sign up there if it's so niche it's not known outside of the tech circles?
- fartcannon 4y agoTell people outside of tech circles.
- vsareto 4y agoMaybe teach using local html and files and save hosting for the end.
- fartcannon 4y agoYou can even just run a full sever right on your home computer and share the webpages over LAN. It's far more valuable to learn how google/Amazon/microsoft do it, than to learn how google/Amazon/microsoft want you to do it, anyways.
- limograf 4y agoHere's what we do with beginner developers who have never coded before: - build pages in Codepen so they can see everything build as they go, fork from templates, and share/riff off each other - export from Codepen to a folder so they can see that static sites are just text files in a folder and nothing mysterious -- at this point I also introduce an editor like VSCode - drag and drop that folder onto Github and deploy to Netlify You can do this in an hour with brand new coders. https://syllabus.codeyourfuture.io/fundamentals/week-1/session#ship-it https://syllabus.codeyourfuture.io/fundamentals/week-1/sessi...
- schwartzworld 4y agoNetlify has drag and drop deploys now. Can't get simpler than dragging a folder onto a webpage