A Newbie's Must-Have Library - comp.lang.javascript

Message from discussion A Newbie's Must-Have Library

Ben C

More options May 17, 5:40 am

Newsgroups: comp.lang.javascript, comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design, comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets, comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html

From: Ben C <spams...@spam.eggs>

Date: Sat, 17 May 2008 04:40:03 -0500

Local: Sat, May 17 2008 5:40 am

Subject: Re: A Newbie's Must-Have Library

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On 2008-05-17, Prisoner at War <prisoner_at_...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> On May 16, 9:14 pm, Andy Dingley <ding...@codesmiths.com> wrote:

>> I've known HTML (to an industry top-percentile level) for abut 5 years
>> now. I might get round to mastering it one day. There are half-a-dozen
>> people just in this newsgroup (c.i.w.a.h) who can easily show me up in
>> it.

> Well, you obviously have a different standard of "mastery" than I do.

> I don't mean "HTML God" or something, ready to answer any HTML
> question for a million dollars on a TV game show...but within three
> hours of learning, one should be able to look at a "standard" webpage
> and have a good idea of its HTML portion, and one should be able to
> create something very similar on one's own. HTML is easy to learn,
> and easy to master for 99.99% of what's typically required to be done
> with it.

Right, and that's how it should be.

I don't know what mastery involves beyond understanding the
(straightforward) syntax, knowing roughly what the DTD is and how to
validate, and some idea of when to use what tag.

You could go into what different broken browsers do with deprecated
presentational attributes or how they repair invalid HTML but it's
easier for the author starting out today just to stay out of that swamp
altogether.

A lot of the bad HTML on the web is because people selling authoring
tools told people HTML-by-hand was too hard (and then their tools output
even more clueless and broken HTML anyway).

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