Learning HTML

[Bruno_A]

Hello all,

 

I have been wondering whether learning HTML and CSS, to build websites from scratch, is actually "worth" the time and effort, nowadays, with services like squarespace, which allow users with zero HTML and CSS knowledge, to create awesome-looking, and responsive websites. Personally, I do know HTML and CSS, as I've learned it, but now, I wonder if it's as good of a skill to have, as it used to be. I might be missing something huge here, so, I would like to hear your views on this.

 

Thanks.

[ThePD]

11 minutes ago, bruny06 said:

I might be missing something huge here, so, I would like to hear your views on this.

Knowing CSS and HTML is very important if you get an in-house development job at say a manufacturing company. Many manufacturing companies will have custom applications usually written in HTML/CSS/JavaScript and PHP. The last three companies I have worked at needed custom applications hosted on an in house web server and have the knowledge of how those 4 languages can work together can help you produce projects that are of huge gain to the company. Some companies also will use Java, but around where I live its been HTML/JS/PHP.

We have a custom application written in PHP that looks at how many records are pulled from the database, it then dynamically builds the HTML around those records, then that HTML takes advantage of our global CSS allowing us to write a fully developed page with very minimal work.

[mariushm]

It doesn't take a lot of time to learn HTML and CSS and it's very useful to have.

 

In your life, you may stumble upon situations where you must design a website to be super fast, very responsive, with minimal bloat ... and that's where most of these website builders fail. They rely on 'modules' / 'plugins' with lots of features that in turn rely on Javascript and lots of external resources (fonts, css stylesheets, javascript libraries like jquery/boost/etc) and that can bog down your website significantly.

 

For example, here's a random website on squarespace : http://www.fireandflourbread.com/

Open developer console and the network tab then reload the page... you'll see nearly 8 MB of content downloaded and ~ 3s (on my connection) to render this basic front page.

Clicking the Events menu option will cause another 9 MB to be downloaded (part of it cached) and 4s to render the page.

 

Anyway, as above poster says you may get into making some reports or search forms or "produce some valid html to feed into a PDF report tool" or "make a html mass email" or whatever for a company and it helps to know these.

 

 

 

[ThePD]

2 minutes ago, mariushm said:

In your life, you may stumble upon situations where you must design a website to be super fast, very responsive, with minimal bloat ... and that's where most of these website builders fail. They rely on 'modules' / 'plugins' with lots of features that in turn rely on Javascript and lots of external resources (fonts, css stylesheets, javascript libraries like jquery/boost/etc) and that can bog down your website significantly.

Great point on the bloat of those website builders. I completely skipped that in my original post.

[homeap5]

Speed in my opinion should be the main factor when someone makes website. It's total annoying when I must wait 5 seconds every click. I really miss old style homepages sometimes - they was ugly, but at least someone try to do something.