<3<p>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!<p>(from the dedication page in SICP:)<p>“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)
<p><pre><code> <body background="animals.jpg">
<center>
</code></pre>
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.
OBSESSED! She did SO good!<p>I taught young girls to code (founder of nonprofit Girls Code Lincoln, based in Nebraska USA) for the past few years - I love this! A few resources that you may be interested in sharing with her, age appropriate for her:<p>Youtube series that we did where our students interviewed women in STEM - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-32uv45Ln4VJGhVr_jr6Q1fCZscKkBGE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-32uv45Ln4VJGhVr_jr6...</a><p>Podcast series where we talked about historical women in STEM + a current woman in STEM - we recommended people listen to this in the car when their kids are there. <a href="https://girlscodelincoln.buzzsprout.com/" rel="nofollow">https://girlscodelincoln.buzzsprout.com/</a><p>My email if you need anything at all, or would like further resources for your daughter. aakriti@TheNonprofiting.Org / info@GirlsCodeLincoln.org<p>TED talk that I did about HOW to get your daughter interested in STEM: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guoLTuW8AX4&t=10s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guoLTuW8AX4&t=10s</a>
The pages load responsively, there are no apparent bugs in the code, the organization is coherent and sensical, and the writing is concise and conveys both information and the unique voice and personality of the author<p>This is a better-made website than like 95% of the internet, generously<p>I like the cut of your kid's jib. Excellent work
> Cats are about 2 feet that means six times there height would be about 12 feet. That would be a very terrifying cat<p>Yes it would. There's something wonderful about the paths that a mind that hasn't been fully toned the way society wants it to explores.<p>Well done.
> computers are a very important form of technology. Without it no websites, no Roblox studio, and no nothin.<p>Don't you love the way children see things? So cute.
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.
I love this. Her little site really takes me back to the age of the internet I often miss.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It was all HTML 4, no javascript, no cookies or forms - all very basic stuff.<p>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.
> 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.<p>Amen.
Very cute!<p>I did something similar with my dad when I was a kid. First basic HTML then Dreamweaver.<p>A couple years down the road and I’m working at a SaaS company.<p>Beware.
This is adorable.
Writing HTML might be straightforward for us, but for a 7yo it's a significant cognitive achievement. It wasn't long ago that she learned to read.
Tell her a random internet guy is proud of her.<p>Maybe this marks the beginning of her journey in tech - it certainly was for me. I started writing HTML at 13 and soon realized that a guestbook involves more than just a <form> tag. That led me to learn PHP.
That was 20 years ago and though I am now primarily a backend developer my passion for learning and working in tech remains undiminished.<p>My son is now 2 1/2, and I hope he too will develop an interest in these things in the coming years.
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.<p>Not quite the first, but this is how mine looked in '98: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19981205195643/http://www.justkidding.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/19981205195643/http://www.justki...</a>
Great job Naya :)<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://htmlplanetforkids.com/" rel="nofollow">https://htmlplanetforkids.com/</a>
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.
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.<p><a href="https://www.seamonkey-project.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.seamonkey-project.org/</a>
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.<p>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).<p>We hosted it at The Well, which even then had a little bit of cachet in the community.<p>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.
I learned quite a lot by viewing the source of this delightfully clean and spartan website.<p>You don't need a DOCTYPE tag?<p>You don't need a head tag?<p>You don't need to declare the charset?<p>The body tag has a "background" attribute?<p>The HTML "center" tag still works?
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.<p>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.
She really nailed page load speed and to a large degree UX (links are clearly links, navigation just works).<p>Many large companies have wasted lots of money on performance and UX while still being worse than this!
"Did you know that a cat can fall from a 32 story building and survive!"<p>I love how this ends on an exclamation mark and not a question mark. Obvious in hindsight.
You know, I wanted to troll a bit by critiquing a 7 year old but I'm genuinely impressed. I love sites like this, her age aside that is. it is simple html and I can discover the desired information without any hassle. 10/10 from me boss! Tell Naya to never forget the simplicity of her young mind.
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.<p>Perhaps a website could be fun too. But HTML 3.2 was much more friendly to beginners than everything that is out there now.
Thank you for sharing this. Actually, your daughter inspired me to make a web site today. I even took some design tips from her. I was hoping to make programming fun for me and I guess not overthinking and keeping it simple is a good start.
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:<p>>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.
Excellent website! Thanks for sharing, I learned something: the scientific name of a cheetah.<p>Tell your daughter to keep making things that she likes to make!
> Tablets aren't very useful. Well to do stuff Computers can anyway.<p>Naya just perfectly summarized 80 % of the MacRumors forum in two sentences.
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.<p>Did your daughter face this problem?
> Cats are about 2 feet that means six times there height would be about 12 feet. That would be a very terrifying cat.<p>Thanks for sharing! This is exactly the sort of smile I needed today.
Seriously, thank you so much for sharing this! It brought a much needed smile to my face this morning.<p>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?
I love this so much! Great work, Naya!<p>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.<p>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.<p>Love to see first graders doing this now!
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Very nice. My daughter made something similar from HTML/CSS when she was 8 or 9, no tools, frameworks, just a text editor. (This was 15-16 years ago.) I think it's good not to be afraid to dive into the "bare metal" approach for kids who then gain a good understanding of the fundamentals even if later they end up using higher-level frameworks.
I remember doing this at about the same age in the 90s using Notepad.exe in tandem with Netscape Navigator to opine on paper airplanes. Maybe it's just childhood nostalgia, but that kind of web felt way more free than today's social platforms, react apps, and SEO.
Love it! Well done Naya, the information on the page is excellent!<p>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.
Tell her she chose a fantastic background image :) Also cheetahs are beautiful felines and instead of roaring, they chirp like birds<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6Qh3VTmtxU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6Qh3VTmtxU</a>
Wonderful! Lucky she, has a space to put it unmonetarized and under her (parents) agency and responsibility.<p>I host a youth computer club and help at holiday camps and see this a lot. Some elementary school kids (girls mostly) love to write.<p>All you need is to leave all the distracting tech aside (No tools! No frameworks! No cms/ssg! No autocomplete) and have a space without advertising or TOS where the results can be show to friends & family. Some also love to draw with <a href="https://twilightedge.com/mac/pikopixel/" rel="nofollow">https://twilightedge.com/mac/pikopixel/</a> on our raspis.
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.
I'm building webpages since 1994, when I was 14 years old. Today, I'm a professional front-end dev of 20 years experience. I've grown bitter and resentful of all the modern garbage I have to deal with that has been invented by so called "experts". I officially request that instead all the web pages must now be designed by 7 year old girls who like animals.
My buddy who does not have kids is continually impressed by my youngest son and how fast he can pick up new skills. Just yesterday my buddy saw a piece of rope and he works building cell phone towers so does a lot of knots with having to climb and haul gear up. He tells my son let me show you a bowline. My son just turned 8. So he showed him once and my son was able do it. I always say let kids try as many things as you can their brain is so capable and so fast to learn things that as an adult take me way longer to do.
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!
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.<p>I hope you tell Naya how much HN is loving it!
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.
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.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180330033122/http://moj24.tripod.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20180330033122/http://moj24.trip...</a>
This brings me back to the olden days of Geocities and other free hosting services, when sites like this were the norm for many people. It's a fun trip down memory lane for sure, and the fact this looks identical to many of those sites provides great evidence for how accessible and easy to learn HTML was in those days...<p>Either way, nice job, especially for a 7-year old learning web development!
Awesome! I love seeing kids play around with code. Curiosity is very important at any age.<p>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...<p>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.
Great job!<p>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?)
This is why I've been hesitating to support a full drag and drop UI experience for <a href="https://www.saasufy.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.saasufy.com/</a> - HTML is not that hard. A 7 year old child can do it. It's good for the brain.<p>An adult should be able to become proficient at HTML within minutes, hours at most.
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 :)
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.<p>It's nice that kids these days don't skip the basics.<p>Please, please, don't ever tell her about Javascript.
> A dog that my aunt has uses a button to tell her if she's hungry or tired.<p>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.
Its so simple, I actually love it. None of the massive complex UI mess that modern sites use....it's like looking back on the early web.<p>Wish I was making stuff this cool when I was 7. I was just into Lego's and rollercoaster knex.
Awesome!<p>That's pretty much how I make websites up to this day.<p>Later, if it grows, I usually add a stylesheet file to separate content and layout.<p>Then I sometimes add some JavaScript.<p>Then I sometimes add some backend storage and processing.<p>Then I need a certificate for https.<p>Then if it gets a lot of traffic, I put a CDN in front of it.<p>And that's it.
You found a loophole on how to earn a lot of points! Now I’m gonna do the same. I just need to find a woman, have a daughter, wait until she’s 7, have her make a website and post about it. Here we go!..
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.<p>Ah the good old days :')
This is so cute. Coincidentally, my daughter has the same name as your domain, and I myself was making websites at exactly that age (but mine were about cartoon characters). Love to see this.
Thank you for sharing. It reminds me of a similar website I made with my dad at similar age, in the mid 90s.<p>I hope she enjoyed it, and continues to enjoy it.<p>I also hope to do similar with my children when they’re at at that age.
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.
I was 7 years old when I made my first website too.<p>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
I hope the tracking script is automatically inserted. Teaching kids about tracking before teaching them what a head tag is should be considered an eternal sin ;-)
My son web site: <a href="https://play-vista.com" rel="nofollow">https://play-vista.com</a> its runing on a raspberry pi. Written with help from ChatGPT/copilot ;)
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.
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!
I enjoyed the website.<p>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.
in this day age, getting past the captcha, false positive bot detection, proving a us based mobile number, etc etc... is harder to get kids started than the actual coding.
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.
I did this exact thing with my daughters (7 and 6)! They have a little guestbook with a password so friends and family can leave them messages.<p>Beats an expiring gmail address
Wow, that computer page comes with a serious color shock, but I guess kids like squeaky saturated colors :D<p>Having fun is the most important thing, everything else follows that.
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!
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.
That's awesome!<p>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.<p>Way to go Naya.
This is so cool. The site loads fast, is responsive and will work on all browsers.<p>My very first website on Geocities looked pretty much like this.<p>Joy of creation.<p>Good job.
Great site! I wish I had started at her age<p>> Cats are about 2 feet that means six times there height would be about 12 feet. That would be a very terrifying cat<p>> That means that there warm blooded<p>> there looking forward<p>Hope you told her how to differentiate between <i>there</i> and <i>their</i> though :-)
Some issues she can improve on:<p><pre><code> - 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</code></pre>
> 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.<p>Come on, Apple. A seven year-old gets it, why can't you? Let iPads run MacOS.
Anyone else wanting to see the original content of /unicorn? Cats are great and all, but we want unicorns!!<p><3 wonderful project. Brings back memories of excitedly writing HTML in my drawing notebook and daydreaming what the pages would look like
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.<p>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..<p>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?)
I love that <a href="https://naya.lol/unicorn" rel="nofollow">https://naya.lol/unicorn</a> is the cats page. This is wonderful. Sharing this in the company Slack like a boomer.
> Sometimes they can sleep up to like 18 or 12 hours a day. That is a lot of sleeping for a cat.<p>Can we just put the author of these pages in charge of the whole Internet please?
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.
Wow, great stuff. Tell her she did a fantastic job!<p>---<p>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".<p>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?<p>---<p>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.
Great speed scores, reasonable SEO and best-practices scores, a few accessibility-related nitpicks but none critical. So, better than most professionals.<p><a href="https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-naya-lol/tkn3le4d53" rel="nofollow">https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-naya-lol/tkn3le4d53</a>
<p><pre><code> <img src="catcute.jpg" width="500px" height="400px" ></img>
</code></pre>
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><p><pre><code> <img src="wool.jpg" width="500px" height="400px" ></img>
</code></pre>
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.<p><pre><code> <br/>
</code></pre>
No need for / in HTML.<p><pre><code> unicorn.html
unicorncopy.html
</code></pre>
Page for cats is named unicorn.html! and for computers it's unicorncopy!!!<p>PS I don't like that CloudFlare Pages strips .html. Too magical.
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.
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?
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.<p>I've no memory for last 10+ years other than computer and programming. All I've pretty beautiful memory from childhood.