To developers complaining that this is not an IDE they'd actually use: where did you get the idea that this tool is meant to be an IDE for professionals? This is clearly an educational tool, and I think it looks pretty good for that.<p>0. pick text editor 1. install text editor 2. find some sample html 3. open file in your browser 4. find some resources for learning HTML & CSS (yep, w3schools) 5. learn that validators exist 6. learn that linters exist etc. etc.<p>With mozilla thimble: 1. click to start new project 2. try stuff (instant feedback), learn about code validation (instant feedback), share your page etc. 3. level up to more robust environment.
This looks like a fantastic tool to use for introduction to front end development. The inline tool tips / tag definitions are very useful if you aren't sure what a particular tag does.
> Thimble makes it ridiculously simple to create your own web pages.<p>Ridiculously simple way would be to edit straight inside the page.<p>Why contentEditable-based in-place editing is still missing in so many blog and website engines?<p>Navigating between html editor and preview feels a bit wrong and old when targeting regular users.<p>I'm not saying that only Thimble is the "old and wrong". I've been wondering about the same issue also with wordpress, drupal, joomla etc.
Neat -- poking around in the console, it looks like Webmaker is using Backbone.js ... I was wondering if anyone from the Webmaker team could tell us what exactly it's using it for?
This feels like they're a bit confused about which target audience and abstraction layer they're aiming to. This is like trying to get more kids to program by trying to show them how easy and fun assembly language is. Shouldn't your energy be better spent developing, promoting and educating the use of higher level tools? It's hard for me to think of an use case for this. What kind of people, exactly would this help?<p>Don't get me wrong. I'm all for teaching more people to code. More importantly, getting more people to build stuff. But trying to teach newcomers to something historically bloated like HTML, sounds discouraging. Many others said before, HTML, CSS, JavaScript are pretty much the Machine Language of the web. It made sense for us to learn those first when it was all we had. But moved forward, it seems more intelligent to get more people to build stuff by having them use higher abstraction layers first. Even more, try to develop even higher layers that'll enable even more people to contribute.<p>I love Mozilla and I love the initiative. But I don't honestly think this will help much.
am I the only one seeing this?
<a href="https://thimble.webmaker.org/en-US/editor" rel="nofollow">https://thimble.webmaker.org/en-US/editor</a><p>Internal Server Error<p>The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.<p>Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@mozilla.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.<p>More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
It complains about perfectly valid HTML, e.g.:<p><pre><code> <ul>
<li>Item
<li>Item
</ul>
</code></pre>
Why doesn't it know about optional end tags? :(
Horrible. No code completion. No separation of css and js. I pretended I don't know anything and got to the point where I had no idea what to do next pretty quick and zoned out.
IMO this sort of thing is primitive after seeing easel.io last week.<p>I suppose I would have liked this when I was first learning, if just for the error messages. But I think, like any programming, part of the learning is running/viewing your program and figuring out why the output isn't what you expected. Maybe each error pointing to w3schools for more information would benefit the user.
It seems to me more like a jsbin.com/jsfiddle.com clone than a real Web IDE.<p>The editor is helpful though, specially for novices. The syntax highlight is very different from what you're used to. Although I find it a little too much intrusive it makes it very easy to spot small typos.
looking for reasons to use this. Other than educational purposes? And where are the pages hosted? This is basically for one off displays of random content?
Looks like javascript is not allowed here. If so - what is the purpose of all this? Does anyone still make pages which have zero javascript?<p>But the html editor is a really nice one :-)