Absolutely not. Learning html is pointless. Absolutely pointless. I don't
know HTML. I could care less about it, its wasted effort.
How do you know it would be wasted? You've got nothing to compare your
current situation with.
I do know how to
introduce a line break and a line feed - basic stuff - that's all you really
need to know. Why learn dead technology?
So that you can analyse what's been produced automatically, and improve
it, debug it etc. It means you have better ideas of the capabilities of
browsers for layout, etc. It gives you a clearer picture of what's
possible, so you could then (if you wish) try to express that to
VS.NET.
There is nothing to be gained by
learning it outside of a mind exercise. It's not a tool you can use to solve
any problem with so it shouldn't be in your bag of toys.
And yet I use it to solve problems very often. If the page I was
working on didn't look how I wanted it to look (or only looked correct
in Mozilla, not IE) then I could look at the HTML and figure out what's
wrong.
The whole point of
asp.net is to insulate the programmer from this drudgery.
The main point of ASP.NET, to my mind, is to enable clear separation of
presentation from business logic, to allow rich use of the framework in
both places (although as little as possible in the presentation logic).
That doesn't mean that the guys developing the presentation shouldn't
know HTML.
Don't confuse html
with asp.net. Control writers need to know html because in that case, it can
be used as a tool to solve performance and optmization bottlenecks which
occur when rendering objects clientside. A programmer absolutely does not
need to know it.
I still couldn't disagree more.
Can it give an advantage if you know it? I have yet to see
that because the ASP.NET model abstracts this process. It's a completely
different ballgame from ASP classic. Different rules apply.
It's a different ballgame, but that doesn't mean it's useless to know
HTML.
Let me ask you this: Do you write your own controls before you use what VS
has to offer because it helps you 'understand' controls properly?
I haven't written my own controls yet, but I would if .NET didn't
happen to provide one that I wanted.
Rhetorical, because you may indeed have done it, but would you recommend
that method to a worker bee out there?
No - but I'd recommend understanding the event model and the code that
VS.NET generates.
That is actually an activity you can do on your own free time. A company
should not pay you for these services.
Why not? It's improving their product by making it more maintainable. I
might just as well say that you should go through every line of code in
a debugger in your own time if you want to do it - it's not something
*I* need to do, so why should any company pay you to do it?
I don't see how you writing your own
GUI code makes it more maintainable in the long run.
The code VS.NET produces is much less readable than hand-written, well-
commented, well-structured code.
why would I be stuck? what good would html knowledge do for me to get me out
of that sticky situation?
It would help you to work out why the presentation wasn't what it
should be!
The point is, this level of programming is obsolete.
I beg to differ, and I believe that being able to understand what
VS.NET produces makes me more useful to my company and thus more
employable too.
Do you come from the same school recommending programmers learn
assembly? I bet a buck you do.
You owe me a buck. I think it's beneficial to have *some* idea what
goes on at a processor level, but there's no need to know any
particular instruction set unless you're getting down to performance
details the like of which I haven't required.
Do it on your own time, it doesn't help you
write more efficient code in the long or the short run and a company
shouldn't foot that bill. The point of G5 languages is to insulate the
developer from gutter work, so they can concentrate on implementing business
logic. Same thing for ASP.NET and HTML. Otherwise we can all go back to
writing assembler.
I've certainly never heard HTML likened to assembly code before now.
It could well be the case. But the argument thrown at me is 'I own the code.
I wrote it.'
That's another fault, and one which doesn't have anything to whether or
not using an IDE is absolutely necessary, or whether knowing HTML is
useful. Being proud of the code you produce is useful, but either
making it such that no-one else is capable of maintaining it *or* just
insisting on being the only one to maintain it is bad. That overly
proud attitude can be held by those who don't know HTML just as well as
by those who do know HTML though.
What have you gained from that? It took you took weeks to
adjust a button on a form because you had to muck with html and styles now
your project is late.
Again, that's a straw man.
But oh, you still own the code. But you haven't earned
your paycheck because a company paying for that kind of productivity will
not be around tomorrow. If you have the knowledge to learn a high level
language, picking up HTML is a snap. It isn't even considered a language,
because it lacks control structures. Again, the point of learning stuff is
that it can help you solve problems later. Show me an example where learning
HTML can help me solve a problem later, that I could not have otherwise
figured out or fixed in a timely fashion.
waiting...
Gosh, you gave me a whole blank line in which to intimately know the
problems that confront you every day? Thanks... (Fortunately I'd
already answered it earlier in this post, of course.)
I'll give you an example where having learned GUI coding from theory
rather than from dragging and dropping would have helped though - you
would never have needed to ask the question about threading earlier,
because you'd have learned that theory when doing the background
reading in the first place.
I don't want to sound hash but this is a painful issue for me. It really is.
I walk over to a developers desk and she is using Visual Studio as a
glorified notepad. Now why did that company invest thousands of dollars in a
product like that when all it is good for is a word editor? You tell me.
So you've got some bad apples in your team. That's not my problem, nor
is it a good idea to throw the baby out with the bath-water and claim
that knowing how to do things by hand is useless. If you had a
programmer who insisted on doing everything in VB.NET (if the rest of
you were using C#) and happened to take a long time to do it as well,
would you claim that VB.NET was obsolete and useless too?
