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Got to disagree totally with your comments. I started software development in the late 70s and have been developing pretty much exclusively for web for the last 15. I am primarily a back end developer although I do full stack. Until 6 months ago I hand coded everything but decided to try Wappler thinking could be useful for the more mundane parts of sites. 6 months later now find myself doing 99% of my work in Wappler. George Petrov and his team at DMX zone have been producing high quality extensions for Dreamweaver for many years, Wappler effectively pulls all these together into a central application removing the need for Dreamweaver. Does it remove the need to hand code, not completely but almost. I can now produce complex data driven sites in a fraction of the time it took me to hand code. The interface is intuitive and facilities comprehensive. Wappler is a fast developing product, updated weekly with new features supported by a strong support community who are friendly, understanding and non judgemental. My suggestion to you is stop taking cheap shots and actually give it a try.

I am a proud Wappler user, also been hand coding sites and backend systems with mainly php, mysql, jquery, js, html, and css for as long as i can remember.

I certainly do not know it all, but also do not profess to know it all, unfortunately not everyone can be the smartest guy in the room.

I really have no need to defend anyone from the Wappler team as far as their development skills or credentials are concerned as in my honest opinion they are brilliant, but guess what they are still human and also make mistakes, I have yet to see an application where the developers can make it bug free on each and every iteration of the process.

What you have done is picked apart their Application based upon their website, if the same were done to you, i'm afraid you would fall just as horribly short of the mark. It is as stupid as if I said "Do not use Elementals by Jason M. Knight" because his website does not yet use https, oh my you have no SSL certificate, your sitemap.xml and robots.txt file lead you to a 404 error pages, so that clearly means all the hard work you put into elementals is null and void. Look he has ads on the site too so that must just mean its a money making scam "sucker-bait" to make the "Deathshadow" rich and dumb down all yee mere minions of his word.

Stupid, right? because I am sure your hard work, time and energy put into elementals has very little to do with your website. I think the last time I looked at my own website was 10 years ago, it looks like absolute rubbish and probably coded just the same. I am too busy making my clients websites as perfect as I possibly can to worry about my own to be honest.

Anyway, I can choose between hand coding and Wappler, or a combination of the two and it makes my work far quicker and easier to compete in a world of WordPress and Joomla, and everything else.

All the responses to Jason Knight in this particular thread painfully make me see how much people neglect to master the core web technologies nowadays. Shocking, indeed.

Got a time-out for my harsh language, so might be a while to work through these responses.

Lee Jones

I don't see anything wrong with the code you pasted, it's just a regular bootstrap 4 navigation code.

Exactly the problem -- it's 100% regular bootstrap 4 code; a laundry list of how not to use HTML or CSS!

Endless pointless classes for nothing, presentational use of classes destroying separation of presentation from content, made up fairy tale tags that exist in no legitimate specification, presentational images in the markup, button tag as a hook for JavaScript doing checkbox + label's job without even needing JavaScript involved, DIV + IMG doing H1 and plaintext's job, attributes like target that have no business in any HTML written after 1997 (even if HTML 5 slopped it back into the spec), no semantic separators of menu items resulting in screen readers, braille readers, and software that reads the page aloud treating everything inside the (pointless) NAV tag as a run-on sentence... Not that I know anything about writing run-on sentences...

End result is an inaccessible mess of how not to write HTML.

If you understand how to use HTML, what HTML is for, or even the simplest aspects of semantics that code should make you recoil in horror!

A 'proper' semantics of that same section has zero real legitimate reason to be significantly more code than:

<body>
    <div id="top">
        <h1><a href="/">Wappler</a></h1>
        <input type="checkbox" id="mainMenuShowhide">
        <label for="mainMenuShowHide"></label>
        <ul id="mainMenu">
            <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
            <li><a href="features">Features</a></li>
            <li><a href="comparison">Comparison</a></li>
            <li><a href="learn">Learn</a></li>
            <li><a href="docs">Docs</a></li>
            <li><a href="extensions">Extensions</a></li>
            <li><a href="pricing">Pricing</a></li>
            <li><a href="download">Download</a></li>
            <li><a href="community.wappler.io">Community</a></li>
            <li><a href="blog.wappler.io">Blog</a></li>
        </ul>
    </div>

Basically they are using more than double the markup needed, with a 200k library, to avoid writing three-quarters to 1k of CSS. That is why I find these frameworks to be so silly, wasteful, and pointless.

The (singular) H1 being the (singular) heading on the page that everything on every page of the site is a subsection of. Unless you use section it is semantic gibberish to have more than one h1, and it's equally nonsensical to not have the first content-bearing element on the page be anything other than a h1. You want a logo image, that's what CSS image replacement is for as you should first be writing for non-visual users following the rules of semantics and professional writing.

The input can use :target to show/hide the menu for mobile from the CSS, no scripting needed.

The menu has proper block-level semantics to say "hey this is a menu" since that is not what NAV means! The NAV tag actually means "this section can be skipped to get to the start of the content"; seriously, no joke, read the specification! It's right there. Even the specification still says you need a UL in there... otherwise it's just a run-on sentence since anchors are semantically neutral.

... and if you skip HTML 5's pointlessly redundant ARTICLE, ASIDE, MAIN, NAV, HEADER, FOOTER, and SECTION tags and just use H1..H6 and HR properly, you don't need NAV since "skipping to get to the content" is the job of the first HR or H2 on the page. Which is why so many "in the know" developers will tell you to write for 4 Strict and deploy as 5, pretending those new tags don't even exist!

Though if you use those tags, it's still a good idea to use headings and rules since most accessibility UA's -- ok, who are we kidding, no legitimate UA -- treats any of those tags as anything more than DIV. Their meaning is either redundant to what HTML 4 Strict already offered, in the case of SECTION destroys document structure rather than enhancing it (since it resets you to H1 depth when you open it), or in the case of how people are using ASIDE you might as well go back to using CENTER and FONT tags. (since ASIDE's only semantic/grammatical meaning would end up as limited in usefulness as the specification definition of ADDRESS... well, unless you do nothing but transcribe the bard or write nothing but Ferris Bueller / Deadpool slashfic.)

The code I used as an example violates the most basic rules of HTML, the concepts of semantics, and the conventions of the professional writing norms that TBL created HTML to convey in a device neutral manner in the first place.

Since again, HTML is about more than just what it looks like on your screen. It's for screen readers, braille readers (like mine, which I do need when my sugars run high and vision blurs), search engines (remember, search engines don't have eyeballs and could care less about your graphics and layout apart from testing for mobile friendly constraints)-- all things that if you ignore you are for all intents and purposes telling users on said user-agents to sod off.

... and telling visitors to your websites to bugger off because you can't bother reading and comprehending the specifications means those doing so -- and making up the lame excuses for it -- are not doing their job as a web developer.

Paul Strydom

Stupid, right?

Yes, but not for the reasons you think.

because his website does not yet use https

You mean the scam Google is using to sell SSL certificates, which is why they get kickbacks and every other release of Chrome attempt to neuter "Let's Encrypt?"

I'd say it's silly to isolate that as an issue when there's nothing on said site in terms of security or logins that require it given the overhead penalty! The only thing that might matter is handled internally by Disqus for me so the host page doesn't need it anyways...

But nothing like a good scam from Google to try and separate people from their money. See the bait and switch they pulled with "pageSpeed" where it's no longer about helping people make faster sites, it's about selling CDN space or their "pageSpeed Service" that makes lousy sites mediocre and good sites inaccessible via CSR.

your sitemap.xml

Hoodoo-voodoo nonsense that if your page actually bothers having all the accessible pages cross linked serves zero legitimate purpose other than a placebo for people who don't know any better.

and robots.txt

As I do not want any pages or content of my site "skipped" and I'm blacklisting 'bad spiders' at the IP / firewall level, there is NO reason to have that file present. Remember, there is no such thing as "INDEX" or "FOLLOW", only "NOINDEX" and "NOFOLLOW" -- which is why it's comically silly when people declare those values -- meaning that in most cases there is no reason to create a robots.txt or to use the corresponding META.

So that too is a nonsensical claim that has zero impact on anything meaningful. The things I'm talking about tells large swaths of users to get bent through inaccessibility. They make pages harder to develop and harder to maintain no matter how many people who don't know enough about HTML or CSS continue to parrot how "easy" it is.

Nice try though. Was entertaining.