Programmers Who Don't Know HTML
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A thought just occurred to me (hey, you shut up, it happens on occassion!). I assume that most developers have had some experience with HTML. I'm not sure why; it just seems like a given to me (however unjustifiable that assumption may be). That may be more true of developers who post in the Lounge, considering we are exposed to HTML regularly. However, I am curious... how many of you know developers who don't know at least some basic HTML? If you are reading this, Chris, might be a good topic for a poll.
I know little of HTML. It is not a programming language, but only used for formatting pages. Why bother with it anyway?
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A thought just occurred to me (hey, you shut up, it happens on occassion!). I assume that most developers have had some experience with HTML. I'm not sure why; it just seems like a given to me (however unjustifiable that assumption may be). That may be more true of developers who post in the Lounge, considering we are exposed to HTML regularly. However, I am curious... how many of you know developers who don't know at least some basic HTML? If you are reading this, Chris, might be a good topic for a poll.
AspDotNetDev wrote:
how many of you know developers who don't know at least some basic HTML?
We have a number of developers who don't know HTML. They program in FORTRAN on OpenVMS. In fairness, I've forgotten almost every bit of DCL that I ever knew :)
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A thought just occurred to me (hey, you shut up, it happens on occassion!). I assume that most developers have had some experience with HTML. I'm not sure why; it just seems like a given to me (however unjustifiable that assumption may be). That may be more true of developers who post in the Lounge, considering we are exposed to HTML regularly. However, I am curious... how many of you know developers who don't know at least some basic HTML? If you are reading this, Chris, might be a good topic for a poll.
HOWEVER...I once worked at a place where, by virtue of (among other things) "he taught himself HTML over a weekend", a 25-year old documentor became project leader for a major web/IVR development effort. A year later, with three failed distributions and numerous after-distribution emergency fixes required (some taking longer to develop and run than did the original buggy code), this individual was packed off to California to another project, and probably never programmed again. At the time, I didn't know HTML, and saw no reason to learn it before I actually had to use it. By the time I did, CSS style sheets had become the standard, so I'm glad I didn't bother to learn stuff I would have had to unlearn later. After all, why bother to learn a "language" that any reasonably bright fool can learn in a weekend?
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A thought just occurred to me (hey, you shut up, it happens on occassion!). I assume that most developers have had some experience with HTML. I'm not sure why; it just seems like a given to me (however unjustifiable that assumption may be). That may be more true of developers who post in the Lounge, considering we are exposed to HTML regularly. However, I am curious... how many of you know developers who don't know at least some basic HTML? If you are reading this, Chris, might be a good topic for a poll.
I thought it was the other way around. When the WWW was in its infancy we had HTML training for some of the people who were going to maintain their location's web page. Coming out of the class one woman was overheard to say, "Now that we're programmers shouldn't we be making more money?"
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
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I know little of HTML. It is not a programming language, but only used for formatting pages. Why bother with it anyway?
Jack Shofner wrote:
Why bother with it anyway?
Do you realize that the page you used to post that comment and the page you are reading this comment on is HTML? :)
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I thought it was the other way around. When the WWW was in its infancy we had HTML training for some of the people who were going to maintain their location's web page. Coming out of the class one woman was overheard to say, "Now that we're programmers shouldn't we be making more money?"
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
Lilith.C wrote:
Now that we're programmers shouldn't we be making more money?
:laugh: :thumbsup:
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Um, anyone who does think HTML is a programming language is simply ignorant. The ML part stands for Markup Language. Until HTML 5, it was a subset of SGML. There has never been a successful attempt to write programs in HTML because that is impossible. There is nothing at all programmy about it. JavaScript, which is associated with nearly all the HTML pages in existence, is a programming language, but it is nevertheless not HTML.
Narf.
I am not convinced most 'web programmers' know the difference JavaScript falls into the category of Glorified Hack in my opinion...
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Actually I couldn't even write Hello World in HTML... I'm a winforms developer, don't need to know all that stuff. Although I did have my own phpBB forums on which I 'installed' mods (I had documents saying 'insert code x at line y') etc. So I have a really very tiny little bit of experience I guess. That was before I became a programmer though.
It's an OO world.
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I'm sitting beside one, which is very frustrating given he has a degree and 3 years commercial experience in ASP.NET and we are all but exclusively a web development team. 4 days it's taken him to add a form tag around some HTML given to us by the design team and hook it up to post to Monorail with its DataBinder. Can't wait until I tell him it has to have Javascript (ooooohhh! what's that??) for some simple validation... Actually, what's worse do you think? Programmers who don't know HTML or BA's that think they do?
Typical n-tiered architecture: DB <-> Junk(0) <-> ... <-> Junk(n-1) <-> Pretty
does this include BA's that want you to manage their 'app'?... mu ha ha ha ha
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I can: open text editor (of your choice) type: hello world save with '.html' extention ta da! html hello world example
Well, after this short, but effective, tutorial I guess I can call myself the grand master of all HTML ;p
It's an OO world.
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Jack Shofner wrote:
Why bother with it anyway?
Do you realize that the page you used to post that comment and the page you are reading this comment on is HTML? :)
I know what HTML is, and I know this this webpage is formated in HTML and probably along with XML. But this webpage was actually done dynamically through either ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, or something similar. I will leave web development to those who like to format pages. I like developing WinForms or Mac applications. That is my preference. Same goes with game development. I know little about it, however, I will leave it to those who enjoy it.
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May the lord preserve us from evangelistic religious fanatics. How, pray, would you go about adding bold or italic text that is not to be stressed by an electronic voice reading the page?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
They make good martyrs. :-D
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<span class="italics">italicize this</span> .italics {font-style:italic} vs. <i>italicize this</i>
My VT220 can't do italics.
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I am not convinced most 'web programmers' know the difference JavaScript falls into the category of Glorified Hack in my opinion...
Regardless of what they know, it is impossible to "describe a document's structure into making the CPU perform some action". The phrase doesn't even make sense. And so what if JavaScript is a hack? It's also still a programming language. But it's not HTML. Some web developers may think JavaScript is HTML, and thus think they are "programming in HTML" when they write an onClick function. But they are wrong.
Narf.
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I know little of HTML. It is not a programming language, but only used for formatting pages. Why bother with it anyway?
Jack Shofner wrote:
It is not a programming language, but only used for formatting pages.
It's not used for formatting pages (not proper HTML, anyway). It's used for describing a document's structure. That's a bit like saying dictionaries are used for filling up your bookshelf.
Jack Shofner wrote:
Why bother with it anyway?
If you don't ever need to do anything to a web page and have no curiosity about it, then you shouldn't need to bother with it. But if you do, then that's why.
Narf.
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My VT220 can't do italics.
I know some firmware engineers who have no clue about HTML.
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A thought just occurred to me (hey, you shut up, it happens on occassion!). I assume that most developers have had some experience with HTML. I'm not sure why; it just seems like a given to me (however unjustifiable that assumption may be). That may be more true of developers who post in the Lounge, considering we are exposed to HTML regularly. However, I am curious... how many of you know developers who don't know at least some basic HTML? If you are reading this, Chris, might be a good topic for a poll.
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Jack Shofner wrote:
It is not a programming language, but only used for formatting pages.
It's not used for formatting pages (not proper HTML, anyway). It's used for describing a document's structure. That's a bit like saying dictionaries are used for filling up your bookshelf.
Jack Shofner wrote:
Why bother with it anyway?
If you don't ever need to do anything to a web page and have no curiosity about it, then you shouldn't need to bother with it. But if you do, then that's why.
Narf.
I did some ASP programming, but that was to add features. It wasn't very much. Other than that, I am in an environment that doesn't require webpage design or webpage development. I am fine about that. I would rather program using WinForms or Mac programs. There are two web servers at my company with third party software. There is quite a difference in WinForm programs and web based programs. I don't have the patience to teach myself all of the HTML, XHTML, XSL, XML, and CSS tags. Plus I don't have the patience to learn ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, or whatever else there is. Besides, a column and row flat based file is smaller and faster to read in and write to, than an XML file with it's tree like structure. XML requires a complex parser to extract the data. That is a lot of CPU cycles.
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I was a 90% winforms dev, under duress I have been known to build ASPX sites, and now do Silverlight, some of us really don't want to build for the web, it really is a crappy platform for business apps. SL/WPF is the closest to a reasonable platform I have seen but I still think winforms is much better. I only build corporate apps, not public facing, and now I'm forced to use the intranet so SL is the decision.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
Yes, I agree. It is a crappy platform for business apps. For instance it took me three months to develop a gift card system using WinForms. I have a third party software - common remitting - that runs on a web server. It took the programmers one and a half years to develop it. They used ASP.NET. WinForms using ADO.NET, or a web browser based app calling a web server running ASP.NET using ADO.NET. Which is better?
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I did some ASP programming, but that was to add features. It wasn't very much. Other than that, I am in an environment that doesn't require webpage design or webpage development. I am fine about that. I would rather program using WinForms or Mac programs. There are two web servers at my company with third party software. There is quite a difference in WinForm programs and web based programs. I don't have the patience to teach myself all of the HTML, XHTML, XSL, XML, and CSS tags. Plus I don't have the patience to learn ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, or whatever else there is. Besides, a column and row flat based file is smaller and faster to read in and write to, than an XML file with it's tree like structure. XML requires a complex parser to extract the data. That is a lot of CPU cycles.
Like I said, if you don't need to use it and don't have curiosity about it, then don't. I am certainly not making any personal judgments based on what tools you know. I just wanted to correct some mistaken comments about it because I'm compulsive that way. I'm not sure why you brought up a weird comparison of data tables and XML, though. Data tables are for rigidly structured, 2-dimensional data. XML allows for complex data types. Only its simplest form would be matched by your flat files. And if you need the complexity of XML, nowadays it's often better to get the more compact JSON data structuring. But that would stink of that hacky JavaScript. ;P
Narf.
