Comment by marknadal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marknadal | Hacker News Reader

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I highly agree, and have strongly voiced "keeping things simple" with:

1. HTML4 (no special/new tags) Edit: CSS, of course (unfortunately, CSS is a pain to learn though, so get a lot of experience/experimenting)

2. Pure ES5 JavaScript (don't waste time with build-steps/compiling JS, that defeats the point/purpose - or if you want to, learn a language like ClojureScript or Elm/Haskell)

3. jQuery to manipulate the DOM (skip frameworks and stick to libraries, this will force you to actually understand JS rather than being a copy-paster. Once you have this down, build your own personalized framework to abstract things away, only then should you try experimenting with Angular/React, etc. others)

4. Notepad++ or Sublime (avoid using any terminal tools, including NodeJS, until you are comfortable with having a browser and an editor open side by side, and refreshing when making changes. Keep it simple: just files!)

5. NodeJS or PHP, GitHub for Desktop (learn basic command line use, but if something takes you more than 20 minutes to figure out, seek out a community/forum/help that is friendly and encouraging to newbs. Don't waste time on channels that make fun of you for not knowing command line.)

6. Heroku (for deploying, and having your page live to show your mom what you built)

I wrote a beginner's tutorial for the first 3 items, it takes between 5 minutes to 30 minutes for people who have only played with a little bit of HTML. It teaches you how to build a ToDo app: http://gun.js.org/think.html , let me know if there is anything I can do to improve it.

CSS needs to be included. CSS is the polish that changes a proof of concept into a presentable product.

There's a number of Show HN projects that I'm hesitant to invest much time in because they look like the author won't bother maintaining them months down the line. Even your nicely made tutorial has CSS. ;)

btw feedback:

* For some reason it wasn't evident to me that the left black box was editable and I actually interacted with the right-side wondering why nothing was happening. Perhaps use something that doesn't have an interaction so I don't try to click the button at first glance.

* Found myself scrolling up and an down a lot to read the next few instructions and updating the code. If things were side by side, this would be easier.

* It'd be nice to step backwards for the instructions

* The pre-formatted code in the instructions is a bit small. Might be hard to read for some people

I would happily pay a consultant $300 an hour to do the CSS for my websites. I imagine someone who specialized in CSS could do in 10 minutes what would take me several hours of googling and hair-pulling frustration.

I will do this for you in one-hour minimums. Just send me the list of wants and the git URL+creds or tarball/zip. Contact me through any channel, satisfaction guaranteed.

I wonder how many can work in CSS these days? The proliferation of CSS frameworks/compilers is nearly as bad as javascript.

How can I apply?

Oh you are so right, my bad, CSS of course - updating my original post, I just blanked.

Those are good points - I need to figure out how to fit the instructions in while still having space for the editor and others. And yes to the others, I'll try to get them incorporated. Thank you!!!

For #3, I say skip jQuery and go with Vanilla JavaScript ala https://javascript30.com

Every green browser have pretty good JavaScript support. document.getElementById will be your friend.

This looks great!! Will have to peek at it more myself.

As you can tell, I'm a vanilla fan myself. Although I do think the DOM is still unnecessarily verbose - that aside, `innerText` still is not cross browser, so for that reason alone I recommend jQuery `$("#id").text("foo")` to discourage use of `.innerHTML` :( .

Why is innerText not cross browser? According to caniuse it's been in every major version of every popular browser for over a year.[0]

[0] http://caniuse.com/#search=innerText

Oh hmmm, I thought I tried it just the other month and it wasn't working. Maybe I hadn't updated IE, but I thought it was the whole Edge/11 split problem. Thanks for correcting me!

To my mind, using innerHTML is far better than including a 32K library just to avoid using it.

This is especially true if you want to apply for a job some day. Programming interviews are going to expect plain old javascript, not a framework-oriented approach. More importantly, jQuery is a tool. Know what you're making before you bother with a tool that makes it easier.

Not the programming interviews I've been in (on both sides).

I agree with you. Though, call it HTML5. CSS3 is OK, but so are Html tables. JS5 is lean and fine, I don't need the class syntactic sugar.

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