htmldog.com !

yes indeed. have a read of the DaveT log in this forum plenty good links in there

This resource is terrible.

Thanks, guys. Regarding CSS, I've heard good things about Blueprint. However, I figure I need to learn the basics before I start looking at the Blueprint site, right?

My job uses C and I don't program much outside of work.

The experts say stay away:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2...rth-the-effort

I agree with the accepted answer. After I heard about it, I played with it, and bleh. The span-24-etc thing being just like tables is exactly right.

Better than w3schools for a beginner

What other resources did you find helpful?

Gotcha, tyty.

All the resources are pretty bad. Diving into HTML5 gives a great explanation of the DOCTYPE, meta, and similar tags.

Of course, once you have a bunch of half-assed information, you have to read the standards and do your best to unlearn all the bs you were fed.

In fact, if you wanted to be sure that someone you are interviewing actually read the standards, ask them when it is apropriate to use <s>, <i>, and <b>. I guarantee you that 90% of respondents will say "never." Of course, if you read the standards, you know that this is completely false.

i would have said never. what is the correct answer?

btw i think nit-information questions offer pretty bad criteria for selecting good coders. it would be like a newspaper hiring journalists based on their knowing when the subjunctive case should be used.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13489641



Juk

Those types of questions are a pretty good sign that the people doing the hiring really have no idea how to evaluate a developer, but know that they need to do some sort of testing.

If you had said that this is like asking if a newspaper reporter the difference between a larceny, burglary, and theft, then I would scratch my head.

I guess it would depend on what you are coding for. If the underlying theme of HTML(5) is to emulate a text-reader, then using <em> (emphasis) around <i>The Canterbury Tales<i> is most certainly wrong.

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps...evel-semantics

The em element represents stress emphasis of its contents.

The strong element represents strong importance for its contents.

The s element represents contents that are no longer accurate or no longer relevant.

The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different quality of text, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, or a ship name in Western texts.

The b element represents a span of text to which attention is being drawn for utilitarian purposes without conveying any extra importance and with no implication of an alternate voice or mood,

It's probably because I am such a word-nit that it shocks me how often this is wrong. No, what shocks me is how many people seem to dismiss the i and b as some sort of horror of coding and "teach" you to dismiss it outright.

Obviously, I am not in a position to hire people, but I just wanted to point out that many things that are supposedly called correct are in fact, quite wrong. I would be more forgiving of the sources if this was the only thing they got wrong, but this list is a far cry from exhaustive, and many of the incomplete information and mistakes is far worse.

Being that detailed for a beginner is a disaster. In order to keep them motivated, having them make something and see the fruits of their labor asap promotes more future learning. It can be frustrating getting caught on the little things and trying to memorize all the details (they can always go back and learn them later)

This.

The vast majority of people that make websites don't care those subtleties. Rule number 1 is to make the website look the way you want it. Most people stop there. Then some people move on to the next step of making sure it looks the way you want on more than one browser. If you want to know everything about programming before you start programming, you will never end up programing.

Triple this.

Dave, I'm not trying to be mean because you are clearly a motivated learner and will be able to pick this stuff up, but the fact that you are learning those kinds of things at this stage is a massive waste of your time, unless you goal is specifically to become a standards expert.

Imo you should be spending like 90% of your time making stuff, and the rest of it looking things up as needed. Or if you want to go through a book go through something with hands on tutorials, not the standards documentation.

It's because 99% of the time none of this stuff matters. Like, not at all.

No, not mean at all. I think my over zealous attempt to get it all down is from the self-learning attitude of be 1000% better than anyone else or why bother?

You guys have been amazingly helpful in pushing me in the right direction, even if I am kicking and screaming at the same time.

Don't forget too that you can only be as good as your teacher. If you find a few random blog posts by random people then you're only going to learn what they are teaching.

In a sense you could also say you are the teacher because it's up to you to figure out which advice is good and which advice is bad.

This is why stackoverflow is so popular. You have a site with millions of self learners all rating the material. Chances are a highly rated comment will contain an answer that most people accept as "good information". It doesn't guarantee that it's the best/100% correct answer but it's certainly better than random blog posts that come up on Google.

I guess I can only be as good as Shoe Lace and Irish Thug then...



Been reading SO like a book over the past few days. Loving it.

Agreed. You can learn so much even without asking questions.

Don't sell yourself short. You already know more about the current state of HTML than I do. I haven't done web programing in years. And even then, it was more just hacking together Wordpress themes to make something I thought looked ok.

In my mind, the key is always good fundamentals. No matter what language you are using, having a strong foundation to stand on is what allows you to excel. The change from HTML to Javascript is a big one. But once you have a firm grasp on variables, functions and how to use abstractions to reduce repeated code, transitioning to another language will be much easier. Javascript is one of the many languages that borrow from C-style syntax. There will be different idioms and finer points, but you should be able to look at Java, C# or PHP and have a rough idea of what is happening.

If you learn from me then you're learning from the author of the 6th edition JS book. I'm not sitting there pulling quotes from his book for each question you have but I learned from it, retained it, and happily spread what I learned in my own words because teaching is the best form of learning.

Wrong. First, you have to write the tests.

lol