Rant: My CS professor said I should skip learning HTML and just use frameworks

I was talking to my professor after class last week, and he told me beginners don't need to bother with raw HTML anymore. Said just jump straight into React and it'll handle the rest. But I tried learning React last year and got completely lost because I didn't understand basic tags or how the DOM works. After 3 days of frustration, I went back and learned HTML and CSS properly. That foundation made everything click when I eventually went back to frameworks. Anyone else find that skipping the basics just sets you up to fail later?

2 comments

2 Comments

cameronn623d ago

Oh man, this brings back memories of when I tried to learn Python by jumping straight into building a web scraper without knowing basic syntax. Spent two days wondering why my loops were breaking everything. Turns out I didn't even understand what a variable was properly. It's like trying to run before you can walk, you know? My buddy always says you gotta crawl first, then walk, then run with code. Otherwise you just end up frustrated and confused.

mark_price3d agoMost Upvoted

That whole crawl-walk-run thing makes sense for sure. But I wonder if part of the problem is that people don't really know what "basic syntax" even means until they mess up something big. You think you know variables until you try to use them in a way that makes a loop crash. Kind of like how nobody really learns to sharpen a mower blade until they take a chunk out of their hand first. Sometimes the pain is what makes it stick.