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Mozilla Announces Web Development Learning Initiative

Posted by Soulskill on from the where-do-all-the-cat-pictures-come-from dept.

bonch writes "Mozilla has announced Webmaker, a web development initiative aimed at teaching the average user the building blocks of the web. Users can join a 'code party' and learn web development with provided authoring tools, and existing developers can volunteer to run their own events. To kick it off, Mozilla is announcing the Summer Code Party starting June 23."

4 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Oh God... by Cryacin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This give me flashbacks to what the "average user" produced back in the day, armed and dangerous with FrontPage.

    Please, for the sake of my retinas, I hope that something better comes out of this.

    --
    Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
    1. Re:Oh God... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Mozilla, and the folks behind HTML5 in general just don't get it.

      They built HTML5 with the goal of making it easier for your average Joe to develop, whilst fucking over professional developers by completely destroying separation of concerns, and encouraging we move away from the insanely well supported and highly interoperable XML to the arbitrary HTML5 markup standard which isn't even SGML.

      But it's the wrong approach. Nowadays web applications are getting bigger and more complex, and Joe Average isn't writing markup, Joe Average is using authoring tools provided by the professional developers - things like Wordpress, Facebook etc. so really HTML5 at it's core should've aimed at being a more professional specification to support that added complexity.

      Still, I don't even think HTML5 is the right tool for the job anymore, we need a stronger push for something to replace HTML and HTTP that better supports interactive web applications for interactive web applications, HTML at this point would be better left as a document markup language to handle informational documents, whilst applications are built using a new language. There's no reason the two couldn't interoperate well, just have web apps use app:// or whatever and the existing URL scheme can happily handle linking between them. There has been a few attempts at this sort of technology but nothing serious.

      Still, back to the topic at hand, instead of trying to get anyone and everyone back to writing HTML markup, Mozilla should be focussing on better supporting professionals, those who aren't professionals but want to be have more than a wealth of information out there to get going already. There are enough bad web developers out there already, this will only encourage an explosion of that.

  2. Because we haven’t enough "webdesigners" alr by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I remember the (first) .com bubble
    - where the taxi driver that drove me to my job, hat a HTML4 book in her car.
    - where I had to work with a sinologist, a germanist, and somebody with a 1-month course in "computers".
    - where I suggested using templating as it hat cut my work load by 90%, but it was rejected because "functions are a too complicated concept"!!
    - where PHP became a language of choice, with people writing things like: if (myfunc() == True)
    - where there were 8 lines of empty space between each line of HTML, because people converted line breaks in one direction only.
    - where indentation was completely ignored, and hence every file required reformatting to become readable
    - where nobody could tell the difference between a reserved word and a function, and hence wrote things like if(myfunc ($x,$y)) { ... }, thinking if is a function, and myfunc is... no idea.
    - where people refused to test stuff in anything other than Internet Explorer (5.5 and 6.0 back then). If they tested it at all.
    - where copypasta was sometimes the only stuff a whole site was made out of.
    - where I hat to fix the spaghetti code, and was called "slow" for it, while everyone else was "fast" because his shit only worked until the next day when I was called to help.

    HELL NO!

    HTML5 is already enough cancer (compared to XHTML5) for a decade of fuck-up.

  3. Accept-Language by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Do you think they could teach the fucktards over at Google what the Accept-Language header is for?

    That way they could stop guessing which language I want to see based on where I happen to be at any particular time.

    Kthxbye.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."