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Comment by SoftwarePatent | Hacker News Reader

"PS: Consider the number of poeple projected to know HTML in 1998 vs actually know HTML in 2010."

What's the answer? A lot more or a lot less?

The bar's certainly a lot higher. When I was in high school in the late 90s, a bunch of us high school kids got jobs as webmonkeys writing HTML for the dot-com boom. It was something you could easily teach yourself as a student.

Nowadays, Google's having trouble hiring enough people with sufficient web skills. And the reason is because the web basically "grew up". In addition to HTML, you also need to know CSS, JavaScript, how to write maintainable JavaScript, DOM APIs, browser quirks, performance tricks, emerging web standards, and at least one server-side programming language. The definition of a "web developer" has shifted so that it's really a full-fledged programmer with specific domain knowledge, akin to the skill level needed to do compilers or embedded systems. And the barriers to entry have become correspondingly bigger; you don't see as many high school kids writing major websites any more.

Exactly, if you want to create a website for your high school chess club there is a ready made solution that while not perfect is fairly difficult to beat by hand. So the average became more complex because the simple problems had already been solved AND you are building generic solutions to cover more areas. In other words Facebook solved a lot of the problems people used to learn HTML to solve and now Facebook needs a few high quality designers not just a HS student with some time on their hands.

Net result fewer people learned HTML because it was not needed.

You also have Microsoft making efforts to obscure HTML completely to create lock-in to Microsoft's design tools. It's long been easy to create a "web page" with Frontpage or Word as a WYSIWYG editor. The followup was ASP.NET Web Forms, where a designer uses the graphical toolbox to make all the interactive fields and buttons and such without knowing a lick of the underlying HTML. The net effect is to reduce the amount of HTML knowledge in the marketplace.

As someone who currently works in Microsoft's web ecosystem, I would have to disagree. Microsoft's tools encourage you to know the underlying HTML and "how things work" under the hood.

I'm pretty sure it's going to be a tough road to slap together a site with Visual Web developer or Visual Studio without knowing the "guts" of HTML/CSS/JavaScript, C# or VB, an ORM, and and a smattering of SQL.

Heck, even their Expression Blend and Visual Studio WPF and Silverlight designers assume you'll want to edit XAML by hand. Microsoft's current generation of development tools emphatically are not in the business of hiding markup language away from the developer.

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