Learning HTML

This week we were asked to talk about how we went about learning HTML and the resources we used.

I probably began learning html around 2001 or 2002 which compared to many people I know was late in the game, but my concentration prior to that only required I view web pages, not write them.

My first resource was my coworker and onetime supervisor Kirk. He gave me a lot of initial pointers and basically said to just look at other web pages and see what they were doing and try to avoid using "flashing" text. I also used the W3 school to get the basics and details down. I still use the school today. In fact, I had gotten so use to Dreamweaver and bouncing back and forth between the code and the WYSIWYG editor that I had to double check hand coding basic things.

Some of the more intermediate or advanced areas I looked at were table cells attributes like padding and alignment. I also looked into CSS which I use regularly in my work related dealings but not from scratch, so at this point I have not integrated a stylesheet into my class webpage. Since I'm coding just one or two pages (at this point) I'm not saving much time but if my page were to grow or become more complex I would need to invest the time into a seperate or inline style sheet to better handle the look of the page.

I really wanted to just hand make my class page without the aid of any GUI interfaces. For example Word (and products like it) is one of the worst ways to build a page as it introduces a lot of span tags and back end code you are not aware of and don't need. Some of those interfaces also have a tendancy to leave empty tags hanging around when you cut or delete content.

On an additional milestone I finally installed my practice system and eveything went well. I was able to ping by host name and assign static IPs to both my practice and VM servers. I was even able to see the webpages via m iPod which is connected to the network wirelessly. Now if I can continue to remember all the steps involved I'll be very impressed with myself. The only hangup I had was when I was pinging my practice system and got "host down." I had forgotten to plug in the ethernet cord.