Help me with my new website!

[bennyboy]

Yep, it also makes the site much more extensible. I don't know much about PHP, but in ASP, we have a kind of dual layering: css for appearance, and masterpages for site HTML. So we can switch CSS themes, but we can also swap in or out the entire logic framework, too.

[KevinM1]

Yep, it also makes the site much more extensible.  I don't know much about PHP, but in ASP, we have a kind of dual layering: css for appearance, and masterpages for site HTML.  So we can switch CSS themes, but we can also swap in or out the entire logic framework, too.

There are various PHP template engines that do something similar. Templates can inherit from one another, so you'll generally have a master layout template, and then templates for various things (blog side bar, interactive map, repeating items, etc.). It's a lot like ASP.NET Web Form masterpages.

If you're interesting in taking a look, I use Twig because it comes as a part of Symfony (a lot like how Razer is the default for ASP.NET MVC): https://twig.symfony.com/

[FlatAssembler]

Why would the webhost care if you split your code up?

Well, if I make a separated JS file and a CSS file along with the HTML file, the browser will have to connect to the server three times to download all of them, and now it only has to connect once. Isn't that how it works?

You should invest all the time it takes to redo things properly, preferably using only .css for formatting the UI.

I mean, the primary reason I can't change the appearance of my app is that I was using loads of absolute positioning inside the CSS. Is there an alternative to it for such apps?

Anyway, in the meantime, I've created another web-app to practice the design and code-structuring on. I suppose it's easier to start doing something from scratch than to try to correctly structure the 2000 lines of badly structured code, especially since I only have a very vague idea what a well-structured code is. This new app converts arithmetic expressions to assembly (unlike linguistics, that's something we both know about). Right now, it's 500 lines of code, almost all of it is the competitive-programming-style implemented algorithm (it does no input validation and is hard to extend) in JavaScript.
http://flatassembler.000webhostapp.com/compiler.html
So, do you have some ideas for it that are easy to program? And how should I program them?

[WinterHold]

I didn't read the whole topic TBH, but as an advice for you and for all web programmers, and web programmers' crowd:

Learn from early stages, how to target both mobile phones and desktop computers.

This is not a scary advice. Use "bootstrap" -for example- to produce your site:
http://www.getbootstrap.com

Anyways; this is my advice to you: leave the static universe; and enter the responsive, mobile first world. You will:
1-Develop better sites
2-Learn tons of tricks
3-Open your design capabilities.

[LastPoet]

I know C/C++ isn't used for webdesign, but perhaps such a tool should be developed. A tool that enabled you to do high level design, but also allowed to get to the micromanagement.

I hear people complaining about how hard pointers are, and segfaults are a thing, but direct access to memory by location alows for neat tricks. It adds much more customization.

You have to understand two things:
1)  Webpages right now are html with java scripts and css.  html describes how content is organized and sends content to the client, java scripts control how the client can interact with the data without posting back to the server, and css determines how the data is visually presented.  That pretty much covers everything you could want to do.
2)  ANY programming language can (fairly easily) generate html, javascript, and css files.

If you are the owner of a physical system connected to the internet, then so long as you are capable of receiving incoming page requests and sending out html files via TCP/IP, you are officially operating a server.  You want to use C++ to generate your html files?  Fine, you can do that.  After about 50 years, you may end up creating something like the Apache server technology, which actually IS written in C.

The same thing goes for browsers.  Internet Explorer was written in C++.  In fact, I think you'd have a very hard time finding a PC browser that WASN'T developed in C or C++.

But that's not the web programmer's problem.  You don't GET direct access to hardware memory or the hardware operating system, because nobody is stupid enough to give up that access.  Nor would you want to-- do you want to have to deal with how Windows drivers access memory, or Linux, or Android, or iOS, or would you rather let THEM deal with that stuff, and just send them the data, the data handlers, and the visual presentation information?

Last thing: ASP.NET allows you to do some pretty robust programming using C# "codebehind" files.  You can use the Microsoft or other .NET libraries for graphics processing, sound editing, and a lot of other things, add files to your homepage, and then. . . pump out those same ol' html files.  I recommend it highly.

I explained myself poorly. No way I would be using C or C++ to do webdesign. What I meant was that there could be a tool that in webdesign gave you the range of using templated stuff, but allowed a lot of customization to advanced webdesign. It is not my thing as you might figure, but in native programming both C/C++ are very versatile.

Ofc I wouldn't allow direct memory acess either. You should pardon my lousy ability to express myself

[Succubus]

I didn't read the whole topic TBH, but as an advice for you and for all web programmers, and web programmers' crowd:

Learn from early stages, how to target both mobile phones and desktop computers.

This is not a scary advice. Use "bootstrap" -for example- to produce your site:
http://www.getbootstrap.com

Anyways; this is my advice to you: leave the static universe; and enter the responsive, mobile first world. You will:
1-Develop better sites
2-Learn tons of tricks
3-Open your design capabilities.

Fuck off.

[GrandizerII]

Yep, it also makes the site much more extensible.  I don't know much about PHP, but in ASP, we have a kind of dual layering: css for appearance, and masterpages for site HTML.  So we can switch CSS themes, but we can also swap in or out the entire logic framework, too.

There are various PHP template engines that do something similar.  Templates can inherit from one another, so you'll generally have a master layout template, and then templates for various things (blog side bar, interactive map, repeating items, etc.).  It's a lot like ASP.NET Web Form masterpages.

If you're interesting in taking a look, I use Twig because it comes as a part of Symfony (a lot like how Razer is the default for ASP.NET MVC): https://twig.symfony.com/

Are you a lecturer in a computer-related course, by any chance? You write like an academic uni professor when explaining this stuff.

[WinterHold]

I didn't read the whole topic TBH, but as an advice for you and for all web programmers, and web programmers' crowd:

Learn from early stages, how to target both mobile phones and desktop computers.

This is not a scary advice. Use "bootstrap" -for example- to produce your site:
http://www.getbootstrap.com

Anyways; this is my advice to you: leave the static universe; and enter the responsive, mobile first world. You will:
1-Develop better sites
2-Learn tons of tricks
3-Open your design capabilities.

Fuck off.

Stick to the context of the topic; please.

[bennyboy]

Why would the webhost care if you split your code up?

Well, if I make a separated JS file and a CSS file along with the HTML file, the browser will have to connect to the server three times to download all of them, and now it only has to connect once. Isn't that how it works?

No, it isn't.

The javascript and .css files will be cached and reused by your browser, saving bandwidth overall. The cost of an individual connection for text files is so unimportant that it's 100% not worth considering at all; people have internet hardware capable of handling dozens of simultaneous connects pumping away at megabytes/second each. But either way, it really doesn't matter. There's no amount of text file that you are likely to send that will have much impact on any modern user. Consider this: I have the entire texts of some children's books in my database, like Alice in Wonderland and so on. The text for one book will download in maybe 0.1 seconds or less.

Every .css file you have ever written, or will ever write, will not all together amount even to a tiny portion of that one interaction.

You should invest all the time it takes to redo things properly, preferably using only .css for formatting the UI.

I mean, the primary reason I can't change the appearance of my app is that I was using loads of absolute positioning inside the CSS. Is there an alternative to it for such apps?

Yes. You have .css files with class names defining how you want objects to be positioned. You do not have "loads" of css, because the entire point of css is to prevent you from having to define a lot of stuff in your markup.

I think when you say you have "loads" of css, what you mean is you are injecting css attributes into controls that you are creating using javascript. Don't do this. Even when making custom controls, you give them .css class names-- then whenever you change your styles, those 100 controls will be styled properly.

The only time you do programmatic .css is when you want to change attributes client-side that cannot be rendered server side: for example, if you have a button to grow or shrink fonts as the user prefers and don't want to post back the whole page.

[LastPoet]

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