I find myself torn on the specific instructions. It's certainly a lot more arcane than my early sites, but that was mostly because there was a whole lot of boilerplate handled by the host (Enter these details into your FTP program, put your files into public_html, start with index.html).
I didn't have any idea what Apache was, how files were served, or really anything about internet infrastructure. And that's fine, certainly good for a kid or to whip up a quick business site, but it doesn't satisfy the hacker in me today. There's too much magic going on behind the scenes for me to feel much ownership of it.
I suppose it sort of depends who you're aiming it at. TFA didn't feel to me like it was trying to approach novices (after all, it's talking about leaving frameworks and libraries behind, novices aren't much using frameworks). Your instructions are good for an easy introduction for people with no web development experience, to recreate that sense of ease, but I think it's a different thing from what the article is going for. Even a simple site requires a fair bit under the hood, because serving files isn't all that simple unless you just hide it away from the end-user.
I don't know, I mostly agree with you, but I disagree that a simple site requires that much. Just drop the files in a folder in some web server and you're done.
I didn't have any idea what Apache was, how files were served, or really anything about internet infrastructure. And that's fine, certainly good for a kid or to whip up a quick business site, but it doesn't satisfy the hacker in me today. There's too much magic going on behind the scenes for me to feel much ownership of it.
I suppose it sort of depends who you're aiming it at. TFA didn't feel to me like it was trying to approach novices (after all, it's talking about leaving frameworks and libraries behind, novices aren't much using frameworks). Your instructions are good for an easy introduction for people with no web development experience, to recreate that sense of ease, but I think it's a different thing from what the article is going for. Even a simple site requires a fair bit under the hood, because serving files isn't all that simple unless you just hide it away from the end-user.