Re: Rethinking HTML 5

On 5/3/07 7:49 PM, "Sander Tekelenburg" <st@isoc.nl> wrote:

>>> The past has shown that leaving that up to third-parties is a very,
>>> very bad idea: authors will not find the 1 decent tutorial
>>> inbetween the 1000s of nonsensical ones.
>> 
>> Why would authors turn to the spec not other tutorials like they
>> already do?
> 
> Because the spec is the one authorative source. That they rely on crappy
> tutorials right now is no doubt at least in part due to the current specs not
> being understandable to them.

But the spec isn't a tutorial. I've only found the html spec useful when
either something doesn't work or something doesn't validate.

The tutorials out there are very crappy. Especially the tons of really old
tutorials that will be easily found via google until the end of time.

As someone who only pretty recently (3 years) starting hand coding html I
think it's not hard to learn the language at all. The only hard parts are
CSS and using forms. And if you're _really_ using forms you usually have to
put in the time to learn something much more complex on the server side.
CSS is the key to making html easy. With css there is a ton of code you
don't have to write anymore compared to table based design and there are a
good many tags in html that I have not used since switching to css, <font>
being the most important one.

Going forward I think there's no need for a bunch of tutorials focusing only
on html. If we want to see web design done right we must teach html and css
together at the same time. Most css tutorials even though they focus mainly
on css, cover all the most used html tags needed to get something done with
css. And in css' case, the spec actually does become more useful after a
person has done a few css tutorials.

I've actually been doing web design since 1999 and it wasn't until a few
years ago that I'd ever even heard of 'W3C'. I think a lot of people out
there are like that unfortunately. W3C just isn't known to enough of the
world as an 'authorative' figure in the world of web design. That really
needs to change. My 'authorative' sources back then were the dreamweaver and
frontpage help files and forums.

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Received on Friday, 4 May 2007 15:00:09 UTC