Sampson4.com

Where are we? This feels like a blog.

I retired from ASP, CMS, HTML, CSS and JavaScript coding in 2019. But I keep my hand in handling small jobs and learning new ways to make things work.

One of the fascinating things to watch is the development of HTML/CSS/JS. In my mind, HTML was a more simple and direct way to build web pages. You didn't need complicated languages or compilers or indepth programming knowledge. It was straight forward logic.

Classic ASP, now about 20+ years old, worked well within this landscape. I could code and debug in Classic ASP from a text file. You tend to learn more, faster when you have to fix your own mistakes. It took less than 10 lines to write "Hello, World".

<html>
<head></head>
<body>Hello, World!</body>
</html>

Then programmers got involved

For me, ASP.Net was not as friendly. You couldn't code in a simple editor. You had to learn Visual Studio and set up an entire structure. It just felt like programmers taking over a simple project and making it more complicated.

Mind you, my late husband was a skilled programmer -- assembly, SAS, shell, C, C++, Java -- picking up languages as they evolved. He also understood hardware. In my line of work, I was the conduit who interpreted what the programmers did, coding it to work for the customer. That is a level of expertise on its own.

And they dummied it down

My current and only hosting provider, Network Solutions, still supports Classic ASP, which is considered a "relic" by its support people. This led to my search into hosting sites, which all seem to be pushing user-friendly web building packages. Hosting for the masses. Nothing wrong with that and quite profitable, I suspect.

You choose a pre-designed template page with limited customization of text, images and pre-set styling. I find false limitations frustrating. Why can't I add my own stylesheet, tweak the size or move that object 20 pixels to the right. This led to some research on which packages allow HTML coding. For my purposes, WordPress seems best fit. But am still testing that ...

But HTML is fighting back ... oh, joy!

Fast forward and HTML is talking about web components, reusable HTML templates and custom elements. We can define the headers & footers once and then add them to pages with a JS include. No ASP, no ASP.net, no java, no C++, no compiles. Just some HTML and JavaScript.

Check out the Introduction to Web Components by Caleb Williams over at CSS-Tricks.com.