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HTML5 Templates/Framworks

A

adamtehbadam

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 10, 2008
12
0
Hi all,

I'm a student who's pursuing a career in web development. Currently, I have a few years of experience working with CSS and XHTML (just now starting to learn HTML5), and a year's worth of Javascript experience. After doing well in all my web dev classes, I felt really confident about my abilities. However, after looking at job boards and doing some research on HTML5, I'm feeling a lot less confident. In school, we hand-coded all our assignments in a text editor using basic/minimal XHTML templates. Naturally, when I began to work on my portfolio I started looking for similar HTML5 templates, but I found that these were exponentially bulkier and intimidating. I looked into, and attempted to start projects with, things like HTML5 Boilerplate, Initializr, Bootstrap, but eventually gave up and went back to starting from scratch due to frustration. These frameworks are designed to be simple, yet I keep getting overwhelmed by them. Is anyone else in the same boat?

Is the use of these frameworks commonplace in the 'real world'? In other words, if I want to be a successful and hire-able developer, should I be building my sites using them?

Thanks in advance!
 
Here are the frameworks provided to me for a job interview this past week.

Backbone
Spine
Underscore
Node – server side JavaScript
Jasmine – this is a behavior driven development framework for testing JavaScript
Require.js
Handlebars
jQuery
CoffeeScript
Sass (Compass)

Now the bad thing is I know nothing about any of these until I searched for them. That is because each situation is different and one cannot know what a specific employer will want.

But to answer your question, yes I would look at some of them and try to get hands on experience with them. Why? Because the interview was terminated quickly. The employer wanted someone who had knowledge and experience NOW, not someone with a proven track record of delivering and would need to learn the new technologies.

Look at Backbone or Spine as they are more general frameworks and then move to more specific items.

Hope this helps,

adamtehbadam said:
Hi all,

I'm a student who's pursuing a career in web development. Currently, I have a few years of experience working with CSS and XHTML (just now starting to learn HTML5), and a year's worth of Javascript experience. After doing well in all my web dev classes, I felt really confident about my abilities. However, after looking at job boards and doing some research on HTML5, I'm feeling a lot less confident. In school, we hand-coded all our assignments in a text editor using basic/minimal XHTML templates. Naturally, when I began to work on my portfolio I started looking for similar HTML5 templates, but I found that these were exponentially bulkier and intimidating. I looked into, and attempted to start projects with, things like HTML5 Boilerplate, Initializr, Bootstrap, but eventually gave up and went back to starting from scratch due to frustration. These frameworks are designed to be simple, yet I keep getting overwhelmed by them. Is anyone else in the same boat?

Is the use of these frameworks commonplace in the 'real world'? In other words, if I want to be a successful and hire-able developer, should I be building my sites using them?

Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...
 
It's only overwhelming when you try to tackle it all at once, which is how I started. It was terrible, but I eventually discovered the secret. Start with a simple one such as bootstrap and treat it like a black box. Ignore how it actually works under the hood and concentrate on using it. They provided plenty of examples. Recreate the examples line for line. Once you get this far, make minor changes. Do this in small increments and you'll realize how simple but useful it actually is. Once you mastered using it, you can always go back and look under the hood. Just don't take on more than one framework at a time. Master one, then move on.
 
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