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You have to learn HTML first

January 18, 2007

I spent about two years back in the mid 90's learning HTML, and basic CSS. I started out with a WYSIWYG editor called HotDog. Some of you old timers might remember HotDog. The special feature in HotDog I liked so much was how it had a code view as well as a rendered view of your HTML code^[1]. This allowed me to learn HTML slowly, seeing exactly what each tag would do in any given context. Hotdog allowed me to do stuff in the design view and then learn the HTML that was required. At the time I wasn't nearly the CSS guru^[2] I am now, and I decorated stuff with lots of yucky <font> tags. It was the 90's, *shrug*.

A few years later I was a fair-to-middlin' Perl programmer and was starting to learn PHP. I subscribed to the PHP list serve and learned from the other Perl converts^[3] in the crowd. I found the level of HTML knowledge among many PHP coders to be very low. People would ask simple HTML questions as if they were PHP questions by default. I saw many people get flamed for being off-topic.

So now, it's 2007 and I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who decides to get into the web development game. To produce a modern web application you have to know lots more than just HTML. But before you jump into a dynamic web programming language like PHP, Ruby or Perl you really should know HTML. I see so many new developers coming into the game thinking they will pick it up along the way. Some do I suppose. I'm sure it's not much fun.

[1] I know, some people don't like to call HTML "code" and I'm quite aware "markup" is a (better) more technical name.

[2] This one friend of mine thinks so highly of my web development skills, he calls me "Destiney, the diety of all things 'HTML'".

[3] I consider myself a Perl "convert". Since I learned PHP I haven't had to touch Perl much at all.

Tags:

php, ruby, perl, html

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