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My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website

dchest
33 replies
9h48m

   <img src="catcute.jpg" width="500px" height="400px" ></img>
Width and height must be specified without units (although looks like browsers accept it, probably by ignoring the unit). IMG tags are self-closing, so you can omit </img>

   <img src="wool.jpg" width="500px" height="400px" ></img>
The dog picture has wrong aspect ratio. The dog is squeezed! It should be 620 × 349 or, if 500 width or 400 height is needed, there's a good mathematical task to calculate the size of the other side.

   <br/>
No need for / in HTML.

   unicorn.html
   unicorncopy.html
Page for cats is named unicorn.html! and for computers it's unicorncopy!!!

PS I don't like that CloudFlare Pages strips .html. Too magical.

isoprophlex
12 replies
9h45m

Is this code review of HTML written by a 7 year old too hackernews, or just hackernews enough? Who can tell!

cowsaymoo
6 replies
8h17m

When the Trump assassination attempt happened last week and every single post on here was still about computers that's when I realized this place is different

throwaway3306a
0 replies
5h34m

That's why I come here instead of other places.

orwin
0 replies
52m

I wouldn't mind reading about it here in like 2 weeks to a month tbh, but clearly I don't come here to read 'worldly news'.

latexr
0 replies
7h25m

It’s not a secret HN is not a site for general news. That’s the first item in the guidelines:

What to Submit

(…)

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It is because you’d hear about that anywhere and everywhere else that it doesn’t belong here. Would you complain that a forum about cooking or sharing wallpapers didn’t cover the news as well?

Though it was submitted and discussed anyway, which always happens. That can be confirmed with your own keywords.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

halfmatthalfcat
0 replies
8h11m

We need our safe space.

echoangle
0 replies
7h51m

Isn’t that kind of on purpose though? I think you will get flagged if you just post general news articles. It looks like political posts are only accepted if they have some relation to technology.

latexr
3 replies
7h5m

Don’t 7 year olds deserve to learn how to improve too? The comment doesn’t appear to be done aggressively or in bad faith, so what’s the issue? Presumably it will be the parent who’ll read the comment, and they can pass it on or not depending on what they think the kid would prefer and/or would let them grow.

Ironically, I find the most HN comments of all to be the ones who complain about something being too HN.

Which is not to say your comment wasn’t humorous, but let’s not be too quick to cast stones.

jnsie
2 replies
4h57m

Unsolicited critique is almost always unwelcome critique, in my experience. Especially where someone else's 7 year old is concerned.

latexr
1 replies
4h23m

Respectfully, if you see the comment as critique, that’s on you. It could just as easily be described as “unsolicited advice” or “unsolicited tips”.

The communicator does have responsibility on how their message comes across, thought not all of it. It’s on the receiver to also make an effort to understand what was meant and not take unnecessary offence. The comment reads pretty much neutral, apart from a post scriptum which is explicitly about the author’s preference. It’s up to you to inject the writer’s feelings as either “this code sucks, here’s how you do it” or “congratulations on making something cool, here are a few suggestions”.

My experience is that life is much better if you take the latter approach. Default to empathy.

Consider listening to “This is Water” from David From Wallace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7xzavzEKY

jnsie
0 replies
2h55m

Let's agree to disagree. I most certainly didn't take offense. I just disagreed (and continue to disagree) with the (your) comment that I responded to. I'm sure the parent of the 7 year old in question was aware of the shortcomings of the code. The fact that a (presumed) grown-up read the post/thread and their reaction was to provide a code review is odd to me and more than a little hackernews-ish which the poster you responded to poked fun at and which you seemed to take exception to.

dchest
0 replies
9h42m

Yes.

piperswe
10 replies
9h27m

No need for / in HTML

I personally prefer having the /> even though it's not necessary, so that I can tell at-a-glance whether a tag is self-closing or not. It doesn't hurt, does it?

(plus I'm just used to it because the book I learned HTML from was confident that XHTML was the future)

dchest
6 replies
9h14m

I strongly believe that the harm we experienced from XHTML should not be passed down to future generations.

Sander_Marechal
4 replies
8h43m

You didn't love the strict and unhelpful generic XML exception you got when you accidentally forgot to close a tag?

tempfile
2 replies
8h9m

I thought the whole point of XML tags coming in named pairs was so you could be helpfully told which tag wasn't closed?

dchest
1 replies
7h54m

XHTML was a move by Big CMS to make edit-and-FTP error prone. Before that you rarely had to care whether the tag was closed.

tempfile
0 replies
7h35m

Is this a joke? I genuinely can't tell.

throwaway3306a
0 replies
8h4m

Don't blame bad tools on the language.

ndriscoll
0 replies
5h6m

I've always been completely baffled by the rejection of xhtml. It gave a way to extend html with new elements and a simple, powerful client side templating language with xslt. The "reason" for which I remember it being rejected was that allegedly web devs couldn't wrap their heads around closing tags and explicit attribute values, which seems crazy to me. Then a few years later typescript took off (which is way more complicated) and react gave a pretend way to write xml except now you need a compiler/build pipeline, and everyone loved it.

xhtml still works in modern browsers btw. It's still probably the easiest way to do page templates. XSLT shows its age without the ability to modify the page after load (unless you run it via javascript), but we could've just added that and it'd be almost perfect.

chrismorgan
2 replies
7h42m

I reckon it does hurt, beyond the negligible cost of the extra transferred and parsed bytes: it teaches something that’s simply incorrect, and doesn’t do what people often think it does.

① The trailing slash doesn’t make a tag self-closing. All it does is get ignored, emitting a parse error (which in common compiler terms is just a warning) if you use it on a non-void tag.

You can’t use <div/>. You can’t use <custom-tag/>. The only tags you’re allowed to use the trailing slash on are the defined void tags like <img> and <br>.

It’s not “not necessary”, it’s “completely useless, by definition”.

I’ve seen people presume they can close tags this way. JSX probably helps cause this, because you can there. But because self-closing tags aren’t a thing in HTML syntax, I think it’s harmful to use the spelling at all in HTML syntax.

② I wouldn’t mind so much if people used it consistently, and I wouldn’t mind at all if it was being used to support both HTML and XML syntax, but if you see sites that use trailing slashes on void tags in their head, practically every time there will be at least one tag that isn’t using it:

  <link … />
  <meta … />
  <link …>
  <link … />
③ I also dislike it because it’s fairly common for syntax highlighters or other casual parsers to get it wrong. Most commonly, I’ve seen tools misinterpret an unquoted last attribute, treating <a href=/example/> as <a href="/example" /> rather than <a href="/example/"> before. (Same with the likes of <img src=/example/>, but anchor hrefs are more commonly going to look like that.)

thehesiod
1 replies
5h25m

IIRC, that's not necessarily true, some parsers "upgrade" html to xhtml and then process the xhtml since its more regular. html in general is a mess due to backwards compatibility requirements so trying to follow these kind of definitions imo is kinda pointless. you can optimize for size if you want but the decrease from these kind of optimizations with modern speeds is rather minimal

chrismorgan
0 replies
2h3m

some parsers "upgrade" html to xhtml and then process the xhtml since its more regular.

I have never heard of anything even vaguely matching your description, and it would be wildly wrong. HTML parsing is exhaustively defined, and the only way of correctly parsing HTML is to use the defined HTML parser.

gravpuse
2 replies
9h39m

The concept of "Connection Before Correction" emphasizes creating a positive relationship and safe learning environment before addressing mistakes.

dchest
0 replies
9h20m

Connection and Correction - pair programming

Connection before Correction - code review

KronisLV
0 replies
8h36m

The concept of "Connection Before Correction"

Oh hey, I learnt a new thing today!

It always felt apt to offer a few words of praise for the things that are good, or to establish common ground in code review before offering constructive critique.

Wouldn’t call it a must, but makes putting one’s own ego aside when receiving critique that much easier and lets me focus on improvement, I try to do that for others as well now!

fintler
1 replies
9h31m

The dog is squeezed!

We talked about that, and she thought it looked better that way.

dchest
0 replies
9h28m

I agree.

_def
1 replies
9h42m

And still with all of that it completely serves its purpose

dchest
0 replies
9h37m

The dog page should be banned in the EU because it doesn’t disclose that the picture has been digitally altered, promoting impossible beauty standards for pets.

nick__m
0 replies
7h39m

  the dog is squeezed!
Her page, her squeezed dog !

j45
0 replies
5h47m

Is this code review indicating a 7 year old will be put on a PIP?

While most of th 7 year olds contemporaries are busy consuming content instead of creating it like this?

isoprophlex
29 replies
10h13m

Wow, great stuff. Tell her she did a fantastic job!

---

By necessity, kids these days don't even need to learn what a file is. Videos are "on youtube". Documents are stored "in ms word".

The median developer even seems to have a very shallow understanding of how a computer actually works. And why would they, if they can just glue some Lambdas together to earn a buck?

---

Praise those that look a bit deeper and really want to know how a thing works, how you can create something truly original with a tool, instead of simply using it along the happy path.

falcor84
13 replies
9h53m

Files are an abstraction that was very useful in the last several decades, but that just isn't as relevant in the current world. Those videos and documents you mentioned are likely managed via object storage in a distributed database, itself possibly using block storage directly, with no actual "file" in an old-school filesystem anywhere in sight.

I still personally cling to files personally, but I have no real reason to believe that they are a fundamental abstraction that is more true than cloud lambdas.

jen729w
8 replies
9h42m

Until you try creating one of those videos, and now you need .movs and .mp3s and .pngs and a place to store the render output.

Files have a way to go yet.

yieldcrv
4 replies
9h1m

You’d be surprised! With many apps on the iPhone you can get by

Edit a video? Built in app, or your social media app is already loaded with that and you can save state instead of posting

Reverse a video? There’s an app for that which just goes back into your Photos app to let you tried that content

and so on

people dont need to have that mental model until something breaks

jen729w
3 replies
7h45m

Right, but those videos are amateur and get 200 views on TikTok.

You want to produce a video of any quality at all? You're using files.

yieldcrv
2 replies
7h16m

source quality and editing prowess doesnt matters at all for views

and you can edit in high quality on an iphone, higher than what’s necessary to view on an iphone

so, two premises that arent substantiated

jen729w
1 replies
7h6m

Show me a million-view TikToker that does it unedited with no files.

They might exist. I don’t watch TT, I’m happy to be wrong.

But MKBHD, Justine, Mr. Beast, CGP Grey — you name ‘em, they use files to edit a production.

yieldcrv
0 replies
6h29m

That’s such a random bar with such random outliers

Someone that doesn’t watch tiktok thinks a millions views is a lot there

Stick with YouTube your worldview isn’t relevant this decade

jen729w
2 replies
9h13m

Also, replying to myself, have you ever had a job? At a place? Where the primary function isn't coding?

Files are everywhere. They are every-thing. Except now, thanks to the disaster that is SharePoint, nobody has a fucking idea where they are any more. Because they've been abstracted away by some genius on the Teams team.

So nobody can find what they were just working on. Or they have no idea if the thing they find is the right version. It's a total shambles.

A hierarchical file system was boring, but it worked. And it still does.

Disclosure: I'm Johnny.Decimal and my business depends on files still being a thing.

moffkalast
1 replies
8h37m

I can't believe I'm seriously reading a discussion around the existence of files, what is this, an SNL sketch?

This very site is being served from a file system.

HenryBemis
0 replies
8h10m

I don't think the comment was about the "file system", more like about the "humans" that dump every file they have to whichever folder they find available, and in the end of the day/week/month/year nobody knows where that file is.

And then the person leaves the company/org and this file will float in space (SharePoint) forever, never to be recalled again, never to be read again, alone, in a cold world (computer room).

Speaking about SNL sketch.. it reminded me James Cameron's reaction on the Papyrus sketch --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm1-k__LF40

isoprophlex
3 replies
9h47m

Sure, call them byte streams or blobs, that's fine too. I'm not disagreeing, but the point I wanted to make was that recently, people seem to have gotten the idea that their objects are semi-magical things locked into some app or some cloud service. Which is fine by the SaaS providers, or course. But it doesn't really foster understanding of the world around you.

Like kids thinking corn comes from the corn factory.

lkdfjlkdfjlg
2 replies
9h22m

When I was a kid I used to think that pasta came from a pasta factory.

fransje26
6 replies
8h15m

By necessity, kids these days don't even need to learn what a file is. Videos are "on youtube". Documents are stored "in ms word".

Coincidentally, I've been thinking about that recently. My conclusion was that this couldn't be true, as it didn't make any sense.

I mean, even when using a phone or a tablet, the pictures they take or the videos they make end up somewhere. And that somewhere must be found, to be able to upload their take to the app or the website of their choice, or to be edited in an app before uploading.

So by extension, as that medium is "somewhere" on their device, they must be able, intuitively, to deduce the concept of a file?

And the take on the median developer frightens me even more. Somehow it feels akin to giving a soldier a firearm and letting him off to go and fight. Surely that's going to end in disaster?

    Praise those that look a bit deeper and really want to know how a thing works
Are people really that hermetic to understanding how the items and tool they use actually work?

Arch485
3 replies
8h2m

I'm 22, and most of my "not tech savvy" peers and anyone I've met under 20 have zero concept of how most tech actually works.

The pictures taken on your phone are not "stored somewhere", they are stored "in Google" or "in iCloud" or "in the photos app". Documents are similarily "in Google" or "in Word". There's no intuitive relation between photos and documents being the same thing on the filesystem, nor is there a concept of the filesystem at all. Generally, things jusr "work" (until they don't) and nobody asks any questions.

Now, I would like to clarify that this isn't a "darn kids these days" tangent, in fact, it's the opposite: darn adults these days won't teach their kids how to use the computer!

I would expect/really hope that when my generation starts having kids, computer literacy will start going up again. But for now, it's totally in the drain.

With respect to developers... Most of them know a lot less than they should. This is also an education/incentives problem.

bossyTeacher
2 replies
7h49m

darn adults these days won't teach their kids how to use the computer!

I would bet most of the greyhaired people on here as well as those who were born at the time of the personal computer revolution didn't have parents who were proficient in a technology that was literally just made available to consumers yet those kids learn to use a computer on their own at a time where there was no internet available to check.

Why do kids suddenly need to be taught personally when they are the first generation to have the greatest amount of resources to learn how to use a computer available for free, in multiple teaching styles, multiple formats, at different levels of detail?

I feel this is related to the helicopter parent mentality that replaced parenting styles from earlier periods

Arch485
1 replies
7h35m

It ain't that deep. Back then, you had to understand the lower level concepts in order to use the computer... Nowadays, you don't. It's that simple.

bossyTeacher
0 replies
7h24m

Still an abstraction if you don't understand how each of the parts of the computer work. And that level of detail goes all the way down to the actual implementation of the logic gates. One who could also include how your monitor display work and the keyboard.

Lower is not lowest.

kapitanjakc
1 replies
8h9m

Are people really that hermetic to understanding how the items and tool they use actually work?

From what I've seen in some of our new recruits, yes. And those are technically educated people.

In general public, I've noticed that if stuff is working well, people don't tend to take a deep look into how it works.

I guess that's how different minds work right ? For example a curious mind wants to know how a thing behaves and how it works etc, whereas a visual mind would look for how it looks.

fransje26
0 replies
3h32m

From what I've seen in some of our new recruits, yes. And those are technically educated people.

That's really the part I can't wrap my head around.. The first thing I tend to do when I encounter something new -a new phone, a new bike, new tools, etc- is to understand how it works, to see what I can do with it, what its limits are, and most importantly, if I can bend those limits to suit my needs..

Accepting something at face value is really not an option. Partly because, more often than not, that would also mean settling for mediocrity as "quality" seems to be a secondary target nowadays. Thing will not work how you want, things will break and will need to be repaired, some artificial constraints might be need to be circumvented. And on the other hand, there is always something interesting that can be learned by being curious.

We are not all wired the same. But if the "technically educated" people are no longer "technical" than at least I shouldn't fear about future employability.

dkdbejwi383
5 replies
9h44m

Abstractions will start coming and they don't stop coming.

People in the late 90s/early 2000s probably complained about people like me who learned about HTML but only had a shallow understanding of how laying out a GUI and text rendering works. Which why would we, when we could just glue some HTML together to make a Chrono Trigger fan site?

kijin
3 replies
8h34m

Abstractions are fine. Everything we do is a dozen layers of abstraction on top of the metal anyway.

It just happens that people who know how the bits actually move underneath the abstractions tend to be better at solving problems related to those abstractions, than those who don't.

memen
2 replies
7h52m

There are problems where understanding one level below the abstractions indeed leads to better solutions. However, I would argue that for a large set of problems, this is not the case. I think being aware of the abstraction (at multiple levels) would lead you to choose the right abstraction level for solving the problem. Of course, apart from school assignments, these abstraction levels are never given with a certain problem, so the more you know, the better you'll be able to see it.

bossyTeacher
1 replies
7h19m

To be honest, being able to think about things in multiple levels of abstraction is an advantage no matter what level you are (writing assembly or writing react)

kijin
0 replies
6h38m

It's because abstractions always leak. You are never completely insulated from the levels above or below you, nor sideways from the other components you interact with.

bossyTeacher
0 replies
7h20m

Exactly. I said a variation of this and some user flagged my comment.

zikduruqe
1 replies
8h0m

I am the last generation that helped my parents with technical setup and support, and my children with technical setup and support.

drited
0 replies
7h55m

For the childrens' sake I hope so. Parental accumulated tech debt from not keeping up with developments is stressful to deal with!

Looking around though I think it's going to depend on what industry parents are in. There's still a lot of cluelessness around even among people who have grown up in an era of computers.

nathell
26 replies
9h47m

    <body background="animals.jpg">
        <center>
Exactly as I would do it if I were a 7yo. Speak what you will about the virtues of CSS and semantic markup, these things get in the way of having fun. And can be learned later.

isoprophlex
14 replies
9h44m

Totally agree with you. Not a front end dev myself, and I have multiple variations of "how do i center a div" in my search history, haha. With varying degrees of angry expletives added to the query.

cronin101
12 replies
8h55m

Kids these days don’t know how easy they have it with flexbox!

WorldMaker
7 replies
4h38m

Who needs Flexbox's inscrutable 1-dimension language when you can use ASCII diagrams in CSS Grid for clever 2D things easily? CSS Grid Kids are truly spoiled.

jchw
6 replies
4h35m

Flexbox, grid. You're all forgetting the best way to build layouts: ol' reliable, <table>.

WorldMaker
3 replies
3h32m

It is almost a shame modern browsers no longer support all the fun layout patterns of ol' FRAMESET. There was a layout tool to cut your teeth on (possibly literally the way it was made out of browser chrome).

jchw
2 replies
3h26m

Not that I necessarily advocate for frameset insanity, but you know what? That is a shame. My controversial (?) opinion is that browsers should literally never break anything that was once a part of the web platform unless there's simply no other choice. If the size of it is getting too big... first, stop adding more shit. (And then maybe, implement some old features in terms of some newer ones. Not really "web platform" but I am a huge proponent of what Ruffle is doing for the web.)

vundercind
1 replies
3h14m

I’ll go a step farther: improved frames and datasource-aware tables and lists with a few very basic features found in almost any other UI kit out of the box would have given us 99% of the actually-beneficial stuff AJAX did, but better.

The Web is a ton worse because we decided to build apps on it but never built the tools to do it right, even though the building blocks were right there.

jchw
0 replies
1h57m

IMO the biggest problem with the way frames works is that it doesn't work well with navigation. I think unfortunately that this is just a design flaw with frames and it needed breaking changes to mitigate.

I think I would've rather seen it go that direction, but it's hard to say. Without a crystal ball, we can't really compare the outcomes, and it's hard to imagine what would've happened in this hypothetical. I mean, I don't think in 2004 I would've been able to guess (or stomach) what the web was going to become 20 years down the road.

dpwm
1 replies
3h50m

As used on HN. It just works, even today.

jchw
0 replies
3h32m

Although there is some degree of silliness to suggesting table layouts in 2024, it frankly really is not that bad. To me personally, the era of float: left and clearfix and 10 layers of wrapper divs was significantly more of a mess. "Oh look, I got my layout working on IE6! Oops, it's now broken in Opera..." Anyone remember using invalid CSS to write browser-dependent styles? How about using Microsoft's proprietary DirectX filters to make PNG transparency work? In the era of taking crummy PSDs full of graphics and chopping them up into images for an HTML template, these were the tools of the trade.

Not that tables were perfectly standardized or anything, because I do remember Netscape and IE not totally agreeing on how to handle column widths, but they sure were, well, simpler.

freedomben
2 replies
4h21m

I know you're not entirely serious, but we really had it good and largely figured out with tables. It's probably because using tables for layouts was my native language, but I still sometimes have to mentally translate divs into a table in my mind to picture what is happening, and when default types are change (like block to inline, etc) it sometimes breaks my brain and I have to fallback to experimentation to get what I want. Slight disclaimer though: I'm a backend/infra guy so don't do frontend very often.

recursive
0 replies
2h30m

Tables aren't even deprecated. IMO you're better off keeping the tables than transforming it into <div> soup. 20 years ago you'd hear it shouted from the rooftops: "Tables for layout are not semantic!". Guess what? <div>s are never semantic. Just use tables if it suits you.

Archelaos
0 replies
3h19m

I still sometimes have to mentally translate divs into a table in my mind to picture what is happening

I still use tables (seriously).

pseudocomposer
0 replies
4h9m

So that’s why some devs can somehow still manage to make flexbox layouts difficult :D

vundercind
0 replies
3h18m

If nobody’s gonna see it to complain that I’m “doing it wrong” I’ll still just throw a center tag in from time to time.

Look, it works and lets me move on to stuff that matters.

squidbeak
4 replies
8h35m

On the contrary, CSS is where the fun starts.

nevertoolate
2 replies
5h32m

Funny how?

squidbeak
0 replies
5h22m

Fun as in being a creative pleasure to use.

gjvc
0 replies
5h1m

funny != fun

digging
0 replies
3h1m

I remember getting confused/disgusted looks at my first front-end job when I said I loved CSS and would be happy to work on styling...

Later I learned that having 3 or more different ways to get an identical result is... time-consuming, at best. When they all might work slightly differently depending on several layers of context (or just not work), you realize CSS is ripe for massive pain points to spring up, and they can happen unexpectedly. I understood why everyone else hated CSS - under time pressure, it's just not worth dealing with 99.9% of the complexities for immeasurably small + abstract returns.

Eventually, I determined that I both love and despise CSS in different aspects. It's complex enough to hold both attitudes. And I'm very, very satisfied that Tailwind came along and (nearly) perfected what Bootstrap et al were figuring out before it.

im3w1l
1 replies
3h3m

The issue with this is that it lacks the semantic - styling separation of proper modern HTML with CSS.

Like compare that mess to the elegant semantic structure of a state of the art webpage like google.com

    <div class="gb_Ld"><div class="gb_Xc"><div class="gb_k gb_Fd gb_z" data-ogsr-fb="true" data-ogsr-alt="" id="gbwa"><div class="gb_f">

kennyadam
0 replies
2h9m

Beautiful in it's simplicity. I also admire how much JavaScript modern websites can stuff down my throat without the mereist whiff of necessity.

skgough
0 replies
53m

I agree with you, but for shits and giggles, to modify this to be evangelist compliant, you could write this instead:

    <body style="background: url('animals.jpg')">
        <div style="text-align: center">
Which isn't much more complicated, and makes it clearer what's going on. I wonder if there is a transpiler like Elm that could take a single file written in a simplified language and gave you an HTML5 compliant webpage? You could argue that all the XML-but-not-actually-XML crap in HTML (angle brackets, closing tags, escaping special characters with HTML entities...) is also an impediment to beginners.

mmcgaha
0 replies
1h8m

I wish it played a midi when I opened the page.

fintler
0 replies
9h42m

I was really happy this still works. It's how I learned.

29athrowaway
0 replies
1h32m

Back in the day it would have been animals.bmp, drawn on Paint

vouaobrasil
6 replies
10h15m

Not a bad looking website. I like it better than most of that responsive CSS/JS bloated nightmares out there. I wish more websites were faster loading like this one.

kristopolous
4 replies
9h52m

try searching with https://teclis.com/ ...

Just type in some word like "cat" and click on the links. They are kinda all like that.

mFixman
1 replies
8h50m

This is a fantastic website. Thanks for the link!

kristopolous
0 replies
8h39m

The web is a lot like music and movies. There's the mainstream pop stuff and then there's the other 99.99% which is easy to forget unless you are intentional about engaging it

k1ck4ss
1 replies
8h37m

I entered "mercedes w204" and found bloated stuff

kristopolous
0 replies
8h32m

I think the true filter, in practice, is to filter out sites with spyware or adware.

This tends towards cleaner sites and really it's the only stable fix for SEO spam

squidbeak
0 replies
8h29m

Steady on. In what conceivable way is a few lines of CSS comparable to a ream of JS?

volkadav
6 replies
5h21m

<3

it's good to see a little person having fun with all this technocrap that us grognards have gotten so bitter about over the years/decades. :) i hope she continues to have a blast!

(from the dedication page in SICP:)

“I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.” ~Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990)

HaZeust
4 replies
2h0m

Kind of reminds me of the quote from the Steve Jobs movie:

"The most efficient animal on the planet is a condor. The most inefficient animals on the planet are humans. But a human with a bicycle becomes the most efficient animal. And the right computer -- a friendly, easy computer that isn’t an eyesore but rather sits on your desk with the beauty of a tensor lamp -- the right computer will be a bicycle for the mind. A beautiful object -- perfect geometry, perfect finish, something you want to look at and have in your home. Flawless. And then a personal computer becomes an interpersonal computer. And what if instead of it being in the right hands, it was in everyone’s hands?"

ketzo
1 replies
56m

I’ve never seen the full quote, and I really love that last sentence.

Reminds me of Ratatouille: “Anyone can cook.”

We make software so that someone else can do something new with it that we ourselves never imagined.

So important to remember that someone could be… anyone!

HaZeust
0 replies
22m

Yup! Not everyone can be a great artist, but a great artist CAN come from anywhere

rpozarickij
0 replies
1h29m

I haven't see the movie (only a few clips), but I enjoyed hearing this analogy from Steve Jobs himself in many of his interviews [0].

Just checked the part [1] of the movie where Michael Fassbender talks about the bicycle of the mind. He is a very good actor but it's hard to match the energy and the electric focus of Steve Jobs.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmuP8gsgWb8

[1] https://youtu.be/BZYZlzIMVw8?si=u8X_mc4BX62ypRZw&t=98

cjohnson318
0 replies
1h53m

Dude really hit it out of the park with the "bicycle for the mind".

nonrandomstring
0 replies
1h5m

Nice quote. Lost it now but I used to have a desktop wallpaper with the old Kraftwerk cover with "ITS MORE FUN TO COMPUTE". We need regular reminders. FWIW my little one is mastering the command line after a year of having to type to get things. Even if she turns out not into computers I won't grieve because if nothing else she learned to type, which is a useful skill itself.

crngefest
6 replies
10h13m

Very cute!

I did something similar with my dad when I was a kid. First basic HTML then Dreamweaver.

A couple years down the road and I’m working at a SaaS company.

Beware.

sausajez
1 replies
8h45m

I just had a visceral reaction to reading Dreamweaver... god those were not the days haha

crngefest
0 replies
6h11m

Oh yea in hindsight it would have been better to just stay in the editor and write HTML - but I was a kid and Dreamweaver was pretty easy to use. Although I did hit its limits pretty soon and tried to mess around with the code.

berkes
1 replies
9h35m

Me too. First framesets, handcrafted. Then Dreamweaver and Photoshop slicing (forgot what this monstrosity was called). Via PHP portals, CMSes (Drupal!).

Decades later I'm tuning YAML files that trigger ansible runs on CIs that compile docker images in which we embed hundreds of npm packages that get transpiled from typescript. Which gets released to cloud serverless edge thingies that store stuff in a database and on some block storage. All to serve a page that's similar in information and feature-density to what I handcrafted back in 1999 in notepad.exe. Yet hundreds of times the size, thousands of times more complex and much, much slower to run and load.

(I'm not exaggerating, but I did pick the worst example. Most of my work is building backend stuff in rust, simple static sites in hugo or jekyll and occasionally sime JS or TS to spice these static sites up with client-side features)

freedomben
0 replies
4h15m

All to serve a page that's similar in information and feature-density to what I handcrafted back in 1999 in notepad.exe. Yet hundreds of times the size, thousands of times more complex and much, much slower to run and load.

Seriously, I think about this quite often. I recently found some old code that I wrote in the early 00s and it was wonderfully simple, and aside from a few visual trends that have changed, it looks pretty damn good. Straightforward layout, good information density, and very clean. The best part is the code is vastly simpler than anything I've seen/built in the last couple of decades (especially since CSS, packers/transpilers, etc started arriving). I grant that there are some good reasons to introduce CSS and divs and all that, and that once we've done that it is inconsistent to have some things done in html and others in css, but sometimes philosophically better isn't better in practice. Sometimes.

samgranieri
0 replies
5h44m

I remember as a kid (like at 13 or 14) using BBEdit then Adobe PageMill

awslattery
0 replies
1h38m

There was something special about being a kid and pushing an update to your site via SFTP on the sidebar in Dreamweaver, then calling or hitting up your friends on AIM/MSN messenger to check it out.

rokisen157
5 replies
8h12m

7 years old? Don't force kids If you need your kid to be kid. Hand coding HTML is just trash than collecting leaves & beautify the kindergarden book.

I've no memory for last 10+ years other than computer and programming. All I've pretty beautiful memory from childhood.

yreg
0 replies
4h45m

I have great memories of using computers as a little child, including tinkering with html and beginner css. I would never trade them for collecting leaves.

Your feelings are not universal.

jbjbjbjb
0 replies
7h51m

Maybe the kid likes to learn about computers and there’s enough time to do both.

j45
0 replies
5h43m

HTML is fine to lean to code by hand.

Tags can provide clear starts and ends for beginners, as well as concepts of nesting.

Folks who learned to code HTML using a wysiwyg html editor may be able to describe how it helped them learn.

episteme
0 replies
4h24m

What makes you think they were forced? Or doesn't spend the rest of their time collecting leaves? You know nothing of this family.

Zambyte
0 replies
4h43m

I've no memory for last 10+ years other than computer and programming.

If you are saying this in a negative light, you should really work on changing that. Try finding things local to you that you can participate in.

lnauta
4 replies
5h36m

This is adorable and made me feel good! I learned something about cats too. Thank you for sharing.

wyclif
2 replies
5h30m

As the father of a six year-old girl, the cheetahs page made total sense to me. My daughter likes to play "Name this animal" with me, where she describes the animal and I have to guess what it is. Why are six and seven year-old girls obsessed with cheetahs?, I ask myself. My guess is that it's because they are the fastest animals.

sideshowb
1 replies
5h23m

Yet despite their ferocity still cute, they purr rather than roar!

ClawsOnPaws
0 replies
2h28m

I had the opportunity to pet a cheetah last year, and I think that is one of those things that will stay with me for the rest of my life even if I never get another chance. The cheek rubs, the purrs, just like my cats would do. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Yes, I went straight to the cheetah page too. They're awesome! I never much thought about them until that day, but now it's a fascination.

systemtest
0 replies
5h25m

I would like to subscribe for more cat facts.

11235813213455
4 replies
8h7m

Some issues she can improve on:

    - H1 content is too long, it should be less than 60 characters, use <p> for the rest of secondary content
    - There should be only exactly 1 H1 per page

jader201
3 replies
4h46m

I hope the “/s” was implied.

I thought about making a similar post, in the true spirit of a “Show HN”, but would have included the “/s”.

commandlinefan
1 replies
4h21m

Same here, but I figured nobody would get the joke. From his downvote count, it looks like I was right.

11235813213455
0 replies
1h40m

Even if not, why would it be so bad to give advices to a young girl?

11235813213455
0 replies
1h47m

Obviously, but it still hurts me to see multiple H1 in a page

rchaud
3 replies
2h44m

Now this is the real internet. Real people writing about things they're interested in, and not with the intention of turning it into a content farm. Of course at 7 years old we cannot expect a deep, fleshed out site like in the Geocities golden age, but I wish older kids and adults would continue this practice of authoring their own pages, and manually linking them together. CMSes are incredibly limiting by design, every template forces you into the default of "blog post writing mode" when HTML offers so much more flexibility.

neocron
0 replies
1h6m

Whats wrong with using a CMS? A lot of them offer html content elements if you wish to express yourself more freely

I don't miss the days of framesets and including the header, footer and menu over and over again

doctorwho42
0 replies
1h34m

Agreed. I think it more has become a race to the bottom in terms of content quality/sameness due to it really being a race to make some level of profit. The whole side Hussle culture, and hyper capitalization of all things is quite prevalent throughout society. So of course it influences us to view things with the lens of "is this worth my time if I can't make $x/hr doing it?"

Also, as a nondeveloper i think there is room for a centralized hub for decentralized geocities-esc websites. Especially with the degradation of google search over the years, and the potential for a race to a deeper bottom than before due to AI generated content

dgb23
3 replies
10h7m

A dog that my aunt has uses a button to tell her if she's hungry or tired.

I‘m intrigued! We also have two dogs and the more I know them, the more I‘m fascinated by their ability to tell us exactly what they feel. I didn’t know they can learn to use buttons to do this.

isoprophlex
1 replies
9h51m

Holy fuck that's incredibly interesting! The dog knows it's own name, composes multi word sentences... that's consciousness and volition on par with humans.

troymc
2 replies
3h1m

I learned quite a lot by viewing the source of this delightfully clean and spartan website.

You don't need a DOCTYPE tag?

You don't need a head tag?

You don't need to declare the charset?

The body tag has a "background" attribute?

The HTML "center" tag still works?

throwitaway1123
0 replies
1h28m

Browsers are very lenient when it comes to HTML parsing. In fact, one of the reasons why HTML sanitization libraries like DOMPurify are so complex is because browsers will tolerate all sorts of twisted broken markup.

digging
0 replies
2h55m

You don't need a DOCTYPE tag? > You don't need a head tag? > You don't need to declare the charset?

True, there are many things you don't need for a page to be rendered in a typical browser, but that doesn't make them useless. For example, DOCTYPE has exactly one purpose: tell the browser not to treat your page like it was designed for ancient versions of Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, with all the "quirks" of their pre-standardization rendering engines.

tqwhite
2 replies
1h50m

When I started using the web, this is what all pages looked like and tons and tons of people had personal ones just like this. It was so great. I used to love touring all the self expression.

Not quite the first, but this is how mine looked in '98: https://web.archive.org/web/19981205195643/http://www.justki...

throwitaway1123
0 replies
1h23m

One of my favorite aspects of the early web was the focus on customization. Your Myspace page was literally 'your space' and you were free to customize it with CSS as you pleased. There's a whole generation of developers and designers that started this way. You still see remnants of this philosophy in the contemporary web (e.g. moderators on Reddit can customize their subreddits), but that philosophy is nowhere near as ubiquitous as it was in the Geocities era.

tagami
2 replies
3h39m

cats uri: /unicorn !

cx0der
1 replies
2h40m

and computer page is unicorncopy

autoexec
0 replies
1h14m

She's already learned to copy and build off of old code. That's how software gets made too.

sunnybeetroot
2 replies
10h7m

Love it! Well done Naya, the information on the page is excellent!

By any chance was this made on a tablet? I see it mentions “tablet… make a website”. Perhaps if children grow up having accessing to tablets over computers, making websites on them won’t seem as foreign compared to a computer.

fintler
1 replies
9h55m

She made it on a macbook using textedit and the finder, but day to day, she tends to use a tablet.

foobarian
0 replies
4h28m

Mine prefers tablet mostly, but every now and then she will ask to use the PC for some Roblox thing that only works on PC and I give her no end of grief for that :-)

noisy_boy
2 replies
4h7m

Wonder why for such a cute and clean website, uMatrix is showing cloudlflareinsights.com blocked? On the off chance that a 7 year old isn't interested in website traffic analytics, is it Cloudflare injecting their shit?

seafoamteal
1 replies
3h42m

Websites hosted on Cloudflare Pages include Cloudflare's own analytics iirc.

marvstazar
2 replies
3h5m

I suggest you back up the HTML files as a record of her work when she was still a child, it will be a family treasure in the future :) You can even add it under your family's domain for safekeeping.

johannes1234321
1 replies
1h54m

I would love having a backup of my websites from ~1995.

But maybe my memories are more exciting than the plain truth.

erksa
0 replies
1h4m

One of mine was caught by the wayback-machine, unfortunately before I ever got to add any of the menu or content functionality.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040207221902/http://home.no.net...

I started when I was 9, using Word as the editor. This was 5 years later and I was 14 at the time), I both wish and am ok with the content no longer being there. At least I can go back humor myself on what I put in the side-navigation.

computerfriend
2 replies
4h11m

It's a very good website. Fast, simple UX, no JavaScript and focused on content.

ryandrake
0 replies
1h45m

Easily beats the performance and accessibility of most of the "professionally developed" web, supported by entire teams.

Naya needs to take over as VP of Engineering at Reddit. The site would actually improve using her approach.

dudeinjapan
0 replies
4h9m

Far more size efficient than anything my Frontend dev team writes. A Docker image to build a React app we have was 6GB. (“Its not our fault its NPM”)

And the content is informative too!

benterix
2 replies
9h26m

Without computers used have to use tablets. Tablets aren't very useful.

That's the spirit!

hunter2_
0 replies
4h2m

Until you get to the tablet page, at which point it's useful indeed!

autoexec
0 replies
1h10m

I feel bad for all the kids whose parents think giving them a tablet or smart phone is the same as having a real computer. They're depriving their children of something really magical by leaving them with devices built primarily for personal data collection and content consumption instead of a tool for creation.

Lockal
2 replies
7h2m

  <!-- Cloudflare Pages Analytics --><script defer src='https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js' data-cf-beacon='{"token": "cf82897298e84b9eb36d9490803c2538"}'></script>
Ah, kids these days!

otherme123
0 replies
4h53m

Cloudflare automatically insert that snippet in your proxied pages. I don't know if you can opt out, but certainly is not an opt-in feature AFAIK.

lopis
0 replies
5h21m

When I was a child all we had was funky site counters. Kids these days! I wonder if she deployed this using kubernetes or what.

voidUpdate
1 replies
9h59m

smh, wheres the responsive react frontend and the database and nodejs backend? /s :P

louwhopley
0 replies
9h50m

...and the websockets!?

tintedfireglass
1 replies
7h7m

Oh my god I did almost the same thing when I was 9, I think I lost the website though. I took excerpts from an encyclopedia on animals and made small blog style pages very similar to this . It was so fun!

aitchnyu
0 replies
6h57m

I was 10 or 11 and I was typing a pocket dictionary to become first online dictionary. Guess I got as far as "abdicate". If I had succeeded, I would have used a free website generator which we call static hosts today.

syngrog66
1 replies
3h29m

This should not be on HN, esp not front page.

kstrauser
0 replies
3h26m

We took a vote and decided it should be at the front.

saghul
1 replies
10h4m

Love it! The background is awesome! The 90s / early 2000s vibes this gives! Looks straight out of geocities and I love it. Great work Naya!

fintler
0 replies
9h38m

She picked the image from a search and download it, then I had her open it up in Preview and set the transparency. Worked out well.

sachinjain
1 replies
9h59m

This looks like a solid first step. I am also teaching my 8yo a bit of coding, starting with HTML but he complains about a lot of typing, he is slow in typing so it becomes painful for him.

Did your daughter face this problem?

fintler
0 replies
9h47m

We have her setup with iMessage (with screen time to limit who she's talking with), so she chats with the family pretty often. I think that may have helped with typing speed.

rossdavidh
1 replies
3h48m

Ok but did you make sure she used Kubernetes to deploy? :) Seriously her web page made me smile. Well done!

joshmanders
0 replies
3h11m

Hahaha this thread made me buy my daughter a domain and start to teach her too as she's been interested about what I do, and I was just getting things setup and yes, her site will be deployed via kubernetes because it's easy as apart of my infra already.

mattront
1 replies
8h25m

Great job Naya :)

For other parents here, if your kids are interested in learning HTML and CSS with the help of cute aliens, my son (who was 11 at the time) and I built HTML Planet for Kids [0]. The course uses a visual editor for manipulating HTML, so that there is less typing and frustrating syntax mistakes, while still exposing the code directly without any added abstractions.

[0] https://htmlplanetforkids.com/

Anaphylaxis
0 replies
49m

It's nice that you advertise your business here but for a passionate child this is boring. Double-clicking a box and changing text teaches them nothing, instead of paying $9/mo I can pay $0/mo and have them utilize free courses, YouTube, and teach them how to read documentation like MDN which will benefit them way more than simply teaching them how to use your website.

iamleppert
1 replies
4h3m

HTML is such a great abstraction and syntax. I wonder if the same 7 year old would be able to (or have the attention) to learn something like React? Probably not.

Maybe we should be testing our interfaces and API's with 7 year olds from now on. If they can't or won't use it, its probably a good signal the design is wrong.

dgb23
0 replies
3h16m

Beginners, especially younger ones, crave for guidance. But what they get is often loud marketing and cargo cult behavior. Now it seems to be even worse than when I was starting out. For example YT feeds get spammed with fearmongering and clickbait thumbnails. Apparently the attention of beginners is very valuable.

Don't other crafts and professions have a stronger focus on understanding fundamentals?

There's also much more useful information today than 20y ago though. Even though the signal to noise ratio seemingly gets smaller.

fifteen1506
1 replies
9h42m

Is it her true name?

I've been trying to get mine to use an alias but so far is one per service and loses a bit of magic.

fintler
0 replies
9h37m

It is! I got lucky with the domain.

brabel
1 replies
1h39m

computers are a very important form of technology. Without it no websites, no Roblox studio, and no nothin.

Don't you love the way children see things? So cute.

clayg
0 replies
22m

this line had me rolling. Love it!

zoklet-enjoyer
0 replies
2h1m

Cute!

yashg
0 replies
9h18m

This is so cool. The site loads fast, is responsive and will work on all browsers.

My very first website on Geocities looked pretty much like this.

Joy of creation.

Good job.

xxr
0 replies
2h49m

Bookmarked and going in the webring

verbalstoner
0 replies
1m

More soul than 98% of the current internet out there

vegancap
0 replies
5h4m

Great website, and very informative! Hope she keeps it up!

tutipop
0 replies
2h46m

Did you know that a dog puts its tail between its legs when it's sad.

Can you spot the mistake?

Neither can I. :-)

Well done.

tremarley
0 replies
6h7m

I was 7 years old when I made my first website too.

Back then, i remember my dad was having trouble using Dreamweaver. I went to try and help him, and found that using Dreamweaver was more fun to me than playing with my XBOX or PS1

tiffanyh
0 replies
2h52m

This makes me so happy to see.

thepancake
0 replies
9h39m

I actually learned something about cats from her page. Thanks!

th3w3bmast3r
0 replies
6m

It's amazing to see a 7 year old putting it all together. Incredible beautiful!

tempodox
0 replies
3h44m

Wow, that computer page comes with a serious color shock, but I guess kids like squeaky saturated colors :D

Having fun is the most important thing, everything else follows that.

taulien
0 replies
1h26m

I love, how the path for the computer page is "/unicorncopy". Already thinks like a real pro!

sph
0 replies
9h14m

Tell her she chose a fantastic background image :) Also cheetahs are beautiful felines and instead of roaring, they chirp like birds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6Qh3VTmtxU

spdustin
0 replies
4h15m

Way to go, Naya! You taught me something new about cats, and I'm probably older than your dad!

Keep it up, you're doing great! :)

sleepyhead
0 replies
9h44m

More correct html than a senior react dev.

sibartlett
0 replies
2h27m

This really takes me back to high school when everyone was writing websites like this... it was such a fun and pure time.

Well done Naya!

sdoering
0 replies
9h59m

Wow. This is so much better than what I created as my first website in 1997 when I was 19 years old.

I am deeply impressed.

sandman83
0 replies
10h7m

she's done an amazing job! More motivation to teach my 6.5 year old something about HTML

ryanisnan
0 replies
2h17m

That's awesome!

I love that such a simple page taught her how to make a completely functional website. Links, images, styling, and even an external script inclusion.

Way to go Naya.

royal_ts
0 replies
9h9m

it's so cute, I love everything about it

royal_ts
0 replies
8h21m

Cute page but what's the cloudflare analytics for

rietta
0 replies
15m

Love this! What a wonderful idea. I hope to encourage my daughters to do similarly as they learn about computers.

revjx
0 replies
4h55m

Great job, and I didn't know cats had such a wide field of vision they could see behind them!

redleggedfrog
0 replies
2h8m

Pretty darn good - looking forward to updates!

raleighm
0 replies
10h6m

Well done.

puttycat
0 replies
9h57m

I wish all websites looked like this again. Great job!

purple-leafy
0 replies
9h46m

<3

pnemonic
0 replies
3h41m

It works! More than can be said for many things I have made. Congrats, Naya!

otts_boris
0 replies
3h19m

does she feel like dropping a frontend framework soon? modern webdev needs that sort of simplicity and focus on content.

otar
0 replies
8h16m

Awesome! I love seeing kids play around with code. Curiosity is very important at any age.

That’s how I started too. Back in the days of Internet Explorer, I used to click View -> Source and mess around with the HTML in Notepad. I’d change the content, blocks, colors...

About 25 years later, I’m still coding, but right now I’m deploying the data transformation pipeline (T in the ELT) on production server to calculate business KPIs.

omneity
0 replies
9h54m

Great work! Back in the day (when I was about 9 years old) I did something similar but for my poetry and dinosaur related interests, and that kicked off my still ongoing multi-decade journey in web development.

Ah the good old days :')

oaktowner
0 replies
38m

I love this so much. From 1992-1996 I was in a band in the SF Bay Area. I played the congas, but really I think they just let me do that because I also took on the band's webpage.

It was dozens and dozens of pages of hand-coded HTML, updated nearly daily, with lots of easter eggs, etc. I had programmed a ton (I was a C/C++ developer at the time), but never in HTML. I learned everything by "viewing source" (at the time, most of the web was hand-written HTML).

We hosted it at The Well, which even then had a little bit of cachet in the community.

One of my great regrets was that we didn't keep a copy of the site -- and we "retired" and took down the site early enough that the Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy.

nunez
0 replies
6h4m

This is really cool! Well done!

numerative
0 replies
9h17m

Tablets aren't very useful. Well to do stuff Computers can anyway.
nmg
0 replies
7h47m

Sometimes they can sleep up to like 18 or 12 hours a day. That is a lot of sleeping for a cat.

Can we just put the author of these pages in charge of the whole Internet please?

nkg
0 replies
1h31m

I notice it did not go down despite the HN hug of death !

nimbleal
0 replies
3h41m

I was talking to my parents the other day and surprised myself getting pretty chocked up remembering how my dad had shown me how to program an ascii animation on his 386, and how the wonder I felt at that in many ways led me to where I am today, so many years later. These things matter.

nicholasbraker
0 replies
10h4m

Very nice! And I actually learned something about cats. Never knew they can see a little bit behind them ;-)

nashashmi
0 replies
32m

strange. still not indexed by google

ms7892
0 replies
31m

Beautiful ♥

motohagiography
0 replies
5h24m

there aren't many tasks adults can do that cannot be taught to children. what are examples of ones that can't?

mg
0 replies
7h47m

Awesome!

That's pretty much how I make websites up to this day.

Later, if it grows, I usually add a stylesheet file to separate content and layout.

Then I sometimes add some JavaScript.

Then I sometimes add some backend storage and processing.

Then I need a certificate for https.

Then if it gets a lot of traffic, I put a CDN in front of it.

And that's it.

matsemann
0 replies
7h39m

Surprisingly similar to our own web page made ~20 years ago as kids. Repeating and animated background, some theme pages with a few words about some hobby or things we liked, and then shit loads of marquee tags, heh.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180330033122/http://moj24.trip...

mahmouds
0 replies
16m

I love it. Keep it simple, Naya.

madcow2011
0 replies
2h12m

Aww, <3 I love this. Keep up the great work, naya!!

lazlee
0 replies
2h14m

200+ comments about a 7 years old website = :-)

Great job, Naya.

l72
0 replies
1h47m

"computers are a very important form of technology. Without it no websites, no Roblox studio, and no nothin."

Amen!

kstrauser
0 replies
3h27m

You better believe I went straight for the cheetah page. No, I didn’t know they’re about 59 inches long! I learned something new today!

kmoser
0 replies
20m

What's her hourly rate?

kls0e
0 replies
9m

excellent read. my favourite webpage now!

karaterobot
0 replies
45m

Tablets aren't very useful. Well to do stuff Computers can anyway.

Naya gets it!

kaffeeringe
0 replies
7h58m

Reminds me of my first website, back in 1994/95. I used yellow text on bright blue backgroud and wrote about music I liked. Only I was 10 years older.

junon
0 replies
9h46m

Heck yeah this is exactly how I started when I was 6. HTML books at the library and websites exactly like this.

Love this OP, thank you for sharing.

jstummbillig
0 replies
10h10m

"Did you know that a cat can fall from a 32 story building and survive!"

I love how this ends on an exclamation mark and not a question mark. Obvious in hindsight.

jprd
0 replies
1h19m

This is the way.

jmull
0 replies
5h57m

computers are a very important form of technology. Without it no websites, no Roblox studio, and no nothin. Without computers used have to use tablets. Tablets aren't very useful. Well to do stuff Computers can anyway.

Come on, Apple. A seven year-old gets it, why can't you? Let iPads run MacOS.

jihadjihad
0 replies
3h46m

cmd + option + U

...

satisfied smile

j45
0 replies
5h49m

This is the way.

isatty
0 replies
9h49m

This is great, it looks nice, works exactly as one would expect it to (very links, no clickbait), cats (the internet was made for cats after all) and loads instantly.

icoder
0 replies
9h40m

computers are a very important form of technology. Without it no websites, no Roblox studio, and no nothin.

Oh yes indeed.

herrkanin
0 replies
4h20m

I think I was 8 or 9 when I started building my first website as well, and it looked remarkably similar to this. :) I think the only difference really is that all guides used uppercase for html tags back then. Happy that went out of style.

henvic
0 replies
1h51m

Lovely! My first website was when I was 9 years old, and I used Netscape Composer to create it. My content was also centered in the screen :)

hassanr99
0 replies
7h46m

wow, Congrats her to dev community.

hamiltont
0 replies
4h47m

Anyone else wanting to see the original content of /unicorn? Cats are great and all, but we want unicorns!!

<3 wonderful project. Brings back memories of excitedly writing HTML in my drawing notebook and daydreaming what the pages would look like

gtk40
0 replies
4h21m

I got started with Netscape Composer around this age, as you could easily switch between the HTML view and the WYSIWYG view and see what everything does. Seamonkey is a still maintained version of the old Netscape/Mozilla suite which has Composer.

https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

globular-toast
0 replies
3h8m

I wish I still had my websites from when I was around 9 or 10. Alas they were stored on a Seagate Quantum Bigfoot (a 5.25" hard disk which we our family PC had for some reason), and it failed at some point.

g105b
0 replies
5h37m

Cute. I'd like to see a pony page please.

fx1994
0 replies
8h54m

Let her play like other kids.

freedomben
0 replies
4h3m

Seriously, thank you so much for sharing this! It brought a much needed smile to my face this morning.

Please tell your daughter that Ben really liked it and his favorite page was the dogs page. Question for her: Is that a picture of your dog? Does the dog have a name?

filmgirlcw
0 replies
50m

I love this so much! Great work, Naya!

Incidentally, I was creating an image for a slide for a talk a few weeks ago, showing off HTML circa 1996 and decided to do it in Windows 95 (which is what I used to write my first web pages when I was 12) and it was a lot harder than I thought it would be (mostly because the intricacies of what HTML versions were supported in the included browser versions of the Electron emulator I was using), to recall what tags did and didn't work.

But I credit HTML with everything for me, as far as computer programming is concerned. Having a way to express markup in a text editor and see the results on a web page was life-changing.

Love to see first graders doing this now!

fermigier
0 replies
1h0m

I like it. This fondly, yet somewhat bitterly, recalls memories of my 25-year-old self creating his first HTML page in 1995, or even my 10-year-old self writing his first BASIC program in 1980.

explosion-s
0 replies
1h52m

no roblox studio, no nothin
eska
0 replies
9h7m

Recently I see more and more articles and social media posts surprised about the current youth’s lack of a mental model how computers actually work. I assume this is due to smartphones and tablets not letting them experiment. Laptop hardware is also usually not made to tinker with.

OP, I think you’re doing your daughter a great service with building an attitude that computers are just machines that can be learned about and understood. I started with HTML at 10 years old, and it gave me a lasting passion about the internet and connecting the world, leading to peace among distant people. Nowadays as an adult I’m unfortunately disillusioned due to negative aspects of social media, dating apps, and fake news, but alas..

Maybe in the future you can show her light javascript, the WAMP stack to make a guestbook (beware of spam nowadays), a cat image gallery with upload function (and a password). The latter features requiring something like PHP or perhaps python nowadays, and some database (I used mysql 25 years ago, perhaps sqlite or postgres nowadays?)

err4nt
0 replies
1h44m

Excellent website! Thanks for sharing, I learned something: the scientific name of a cheetah.

Tell your daughter to keep making things that she likes to make!

erickhill
0 replies
2h50m

I love this. Her little site really takes me back to the age of the internet I often miss.

Back in the 90s, fresh out of art school I knew I needed to create a portfolio website of some sort. I went to a Borders Books and got a book about 4 or 5 inches think about HTML and how to craft a site using a tool built into Netscape Navigator. Over the course of a week or so I created a site very similar in function to the one in the OP. The main difference was the content.

On my homepage I featured one of my drawings - a color pencil rendering of a very large/wide man in a jock strap looking at the viewer with a cunning smile. Yes, I was very mature. You had click on his belly to enter the site. This was where I learned to make an image map for the first time. When you clicked it he said, "Ooh, that tickles" and then you were in where the portfolio and navigation was presented.

It was all HTML 4, no javascript, no cookies or forms - all very basic stuff.

And that site got me my first real job in the design world (at an Adobe competitor called Micrografx, which later imploded). The rest is history! Thanks, Netscape.

elijahbenizzy
0 replies
17m

This is absolutely delightful. Perhaps my favorite line:

"Without it no websites, no Roblox studio, and no nothin."

eitland
0 replies
9h52m

She really nailed page load speed and to a large degree UX (links are clearly links, navigation just works).

Many large companies have wasted lots of money on performance and UX while still being worse than this!

dxxvi
0 replies
52m

If she has those concepts about html, she will learn more about html and then css very quickly with the help of AI.

duiker101
0 replies
9h35m

Fantastic! Only comment I could possibly have is that the cats page needs more pics of cats.

domatic1
0 replies
3h59m

it's so refreshing not to get popups and cookie gdpr nice!

devoutsalsa
0 replies
8h13m

Now tell her to deploy it on Kubernetes.

dev1ycan
0 replies
47m

:3 so cute it made my day a bit happier thanks for posting

dep_b
0 replies
1h50m

I showed my kid (also around that age) how you could have fun with PRINT statements in C64 BASIC. He really enjoyed it and just the idea alone that you could control the computer instead of it being a black box.

Perhaps a website could be fun too. But HTML 3.2 was much more friendly to beginners than everything that is out there now.

denysvitali
0 replies
8h47m

The page is not responsive... /s

Jokes aside, impressive for a 7 years old!

dannypovolotski
0 replies
5h45m

The cat page is my favorite

cue_the_strings
0 replies
7h41m

Cool! I made my first HTML website in 2001, when I was 10. The ISP allowed you FTP some HTML and image files into a folder, and you got a little website.

Figuring out HTML was not too hard for me as a kid. Things enclosing other things is not a hard to grasp concept. I didn't use CSS and back then you had <center> and stuff; nowadays it's frowned upon as mixing up semantics and presentation, but back then it made sense to me.

But doing any sort of programming (like at least writing batch files that had ifs and loops) was way harder and it took me several years to figure out.

coding123
0 replies
4h6m

This looks like the pages I made when I was 14-ish (45yo here) on a modem.

carabiner
0 replies
2h41m

Kids should be outside playing with other kids.

callamdelaney
0 replies
2h45m

No darkmode, literally unusable

bitwize
0 replies
1h22m

I love the Geocities-era Web 1.0 energy this has. Your daughter is avery creative person.

biosboiii
0 replies
5h3m

Cloudflare Page Analytics Beacon without asking for my consent first.

Hopefully she has a heavy piggybank for my incoming GDPR lawsuit /s

bdcravens
0 replies
4h23m

Great job!

I was significantly older when I built my first website (19, in 1996) but I'm so glad I had a space to pretty easily put up basic HTML (Geocities, though there were similar options). No WYSIWYG, no build steps, just the basic text-only HTML which created a foundation to build on. It's unfortunate there aren't really good options for that for today's younger creators. (is there?)

appel
0 replies
43m

computers are a very important form of technology. Without it no websites, no Roblox studio, and no nothin.

Well put, Naya!

apeace
0 replies
1h56m

This is the best thing I've seen on the internet in a long time. I'm going to bookmark it and check back for more informative content.

I hope you tell Naya how much HN is loving it!

antisthenes
0 replies
5h2m

This looks like my first website that I made for the game Freelancer around 2003, which was essentially just a short description of the game and a bunch of screenshots I made during gameplay.

It's nice that kids these days don't skip the basics.

Please, please, don't ever tell her about Javascript.

andrewfurey2003
0 replies
1h46m

No pop ups No cookies Loads quickly. Only thing is the cloudflare pages analytics js. Frontend masterpiece lol

andreime
0 replies
9h41m

Not very different than what I did when I started, with XHTML et al. She did a great job.

aldousd666
0 replies
5h13m

Good for the kid getting her hands dirty! I was learning C by the time I was 9, but if HTML and the public Internet had been around when I was that age, I may have went that way instead!

_wire_
0 replies
51m

Q: When's the best time to take your kids to dinner?

A: When the graduate from medical school!

—Dave Barry

Vt71fcAqt7
0 replies
9h35m

This is actually better than 90% of websites today: loads fast, no nav bars, no position: sticky, no cookie popups, no ads. The content is informative and straight to the point. A website worthy to be the inverse of the much ignored related guideline:

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
TonyTrapp
0 replies
9h46m

Love the 90s look. Well done!

RobertJaTomsons
0 replies
9h51m

I love this domain name so much. <3 Great job to your daughter.

Pavilion2095
0 replies
53m

That's cool. I remember myself around that age. Before I learned about HTML, I used to draw web sites in MS Paint. And these both activities were so much fun.

Michvalwin
0 replies
9h38m

She centered the page like a pro. Also, It gave me nostalgia watching how fast the page loads.

Maksadbek
0 replies
8h44m

Fantastic! Are you going to teach her JavaScript as well ?

M4R5H4LL
0 replies
1h49m

Wow, this is so cool! Your website is clear and easy to read. It's super easy to find everything, and it works really fast too. Awesome job, keep it up!

HaZeust
0 replies
2h3m

I often hear about the simplicity form factors of the internet in a bygone era, before my time, in the mid to late 90's. Now, from all the stories I've heard and the visuals I've seen, someone that's a third of my age now seems to be delivering that spirit of simplicity back :)

Gnarl
0 replies
8h35m

This is absolutely adorable :) Well done Naya!

Devilboy1809
0 replies
22m

Mój syn w wieku 17 lat użył broni pneumatycznej do nagotowania urojonego przez siebie sąsiada. Nieważne czy to z htm czy to jest broń ważne jest cel aspekt, afekt. To my decydujemy z jakiej broni i do kogo będziemy celować.

CodeWriter23
0 replies
2h48m

[big smile]

AzzyHN
0 replies
2h57m

"Cats are about 2 feet that means six times there height would be about 12 feet."

hehehehehe

29athrowaway
0 replies
1h31m

I enjoyed the website.

It just needed a marquee, blink, visit counter, guestbook, under construction disclaimer, some pixelated 256 color palette animated gif, and you would become one of us.