Brand new and feeling kind of ridiculous right now. Could someone help?

1    06 Mar 2017 14:40 by u/11976007

Hello everyone.

I'm new to programming. To complicate matters, I'm in my late 30's and not able to retain information like I used to, let alone know as much as someone half my age. Anyways, here is my issue. I feel ridiculous for asking but can someone tell me what program to use for editing HTML? I am running a basic laptop with Windows 8.1.

Right now I am trying to build my online resume. .I have used notepad++ to write my code but now I want to style it and can't find what I need. I have checked google and can't find an actual CSS program and the sites I did find have a list of programs being used. I don't know anything about these programs and I don't want to invest in a $50 program just to find out it wasn't what I needed.

A special thank you to anyone who helps out here and, as a bonus, you will be awarded all the upVoat's I can spare.

7 comments

3 u/xyzzy 06 Mar 2017 14:50

HTML & CSS isn't programming, it's markup.

For a beginner I highly recommend a good text editor with syntax highlighting (like notepad++ for example). This way you'll actually learn what you're doing and not just click around until you get what you want without knowing what's going on behind the scenes. An editor and a browser is all you need, the browser not only for testing your site, but also for the reference and a search engine.

1 u/Tetromino 15 Mar 2017 20:45

I would tend to agree.

However, you may be interested to know that CSS is complex enough now that you can build very complex selectors to create UI actions. I now consider some of my CSS as "firmware" which has a set of actions the display can perform. Then HTML becomes the program which selects CSS opcodes to run by invoking the firmware functions.

Currently I use such a model in a sort of MVC. Where, even without JS, the View (HTML) is often a short compiled program / set of visual actions, which run on the site-wide display's firmware (CSS). The controller updates the model and then compiles a new program to run in the view.

In a similar way that punched cards were a program fed to looms to weave a pattern, HTML can be instructions that determine the order of operations executed by a virtual machine (browser) loaded with firmware (CSS). One might say that when writing such HTML/CSS you know what the output will be, it's just a marked up display. I would say this is no different than the loom's program of punched cards which the programmer knew would produce a certain pattern, but had to be executed on the loom (or browser) before said output could be viewed. CSS+browser machine accepts limited input during the running of the program, reacting to :hover and :active events, this is actually more complex than the loom which does not accept input while running its program. Today's clients' displays are extremely thick, and thus you can actually program them (even without using JS to a certain extent). This makes the controller a program that writes programs that will run in the display.

That said, most people don't use HTML or CSS in such a way. Most treat them as static output from a user or server side program.

TL;DR: HTML can be used as programming opcodes that run on a CSS virtual display device. Markup is actually opcode for programming the rendering machine.

1 u/Strange_Attractor 06 Mar 2017 16:04

Check out codeacademy.

1 u/Antikaon 08 Mar 2017 13:18

Personally, for general purpose editing, I use Vim. But, for other development and larger projects....

I'm going to throw this out there. It's not one of the usual editors people suggest. Also, It's not just an editor, it an IDE with support for Java, C, C++, HTML, Javascript, CSS, PHP and more. It supports creating HTML5 projects with a debugger that integrates into Google Chome too. It supports version control right out of the box with Git, SVN, or Mercurial. I've used it to push to GitHub repositories too.

It's not the fastest IDE I've ever used, but it is extremely capable.

NetBeans https://netbeans.org/downloads/

0 u/mbenbernard 14 Mar 2017 17:33

How good is your knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript? And what about programming is general?

This is just a feeling of mine, but if you're asking what "CSS program" you should use, perhaps you're missing the basics.

  1. Grab a good text editor and a browser (Notepad++ and Chrome will do the job).
  2. Read a few books about those topics and complete the exercises. The "Head First" collection from O'Reilly is quite good for beginners.
  3. Create your first website or blog. Customize its look using HTML and CSS. Perfect it.
  4. Then write your first web app - to do that, you'll probably need to learn a new language for the backend (Node.js, Python, etc.).

N.B.: You don't need a separate program to "style" HTML markup. You just need to edit a CSS stylesheet with a text editor and view the results in a browser. After going through the bullets above, you should be able to do it.

0 u/ForgotMyName 16 Mar 2017 00:17

Visual Studio Code is also free. So is Atom. A lot of people use the free version of Sublime.