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by michaelpb 1968 days ago
A few years ago when teaching at a previous coding bootcamp that started with FE JavaScript, I remember my surprise when well-performing students got through 3 months or so of it and were confused and very impressed when I showed them how an <a> tag worked, since they had only been aware of (jQuery) JavaScript powered pages. When you are stuck just doing JS powered SPAs, an <a> tag seems like advanced technology!

I ended up at a new school creating a new curriculum. This approach is where we "recapitulate the evolution of the web", so we start with SSGs & server-side programming (Python/Django), then only at the end cover SPAs and React.JS -- since, as you mentioned, that's still the main skillset that companies are new devs for.
1 comments
SulfurHexaFluri 1968 days ago
Almost every JS app I have seen uses a tags though. Even if they are just links to # pages. With most router libraries you can even use real paths and it works all on the front end. Sounds like you found one anecdotal case that didn't know this.
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michaelpb 1968 days ago
Maybe I wasn't clear -- What I meant to say is that the curriculum barely covered <a> tags, but instead started just with JS DOM manipulation, which meant students were using document.location on click events since they weren't taught anything else. This isn't a criticism of JS best practices, instead it's a criticism of how it's taught, specifically in this curriculum that's sold as a white-label curriculum and used by MANY bootcamps across the US. It might even be the most popular coding bootcamp curriculum in the country. It's possible they've improved it since I was teaching it, but definitely it was not the case a few years ago!
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ratww 1967 days ago
Exactly. And sometimes they're not even taught it! But since they also weren't taught the foundations, they also won't know how to "ask" questions. So they end up searching for "how do go to another page using Javascript", which will obviously yield results with window.location.
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ratww 1968 days ago
It definitely happens. I've seen some internship/junior interview tests where candidates use javascript's window.open or window.location to link to some fixed destination rather than just using an anchor tag.
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