All We Need Is A Syllabus

27 September 2003

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about best ways for learning:

  • (X)HTML
  • CSS
  • web standards
  • accessibility
  • PHP
  • well-formed markup
  • the semantic web
I realized that there are several key boundaries on this effort. First is how I (or anyone) learns. Would I learn by lecture? Would I learn by doing? Would I learn by examples? Would I learn by understanding the history of HTML and XHTML?

Second is how those methods need to change depending upon what the subject is. The process of learning American history from 1600 to 1776 is far different from learning the syntax associated with well-formed, semantic markup.

A third boundary on the process involves what one wants to do with the acquired knowledge. In the case of the (X)HTML, I want to know how someone starts with Notepad and ends up with a body of work like this.

I want to understand what skills and know-how these people bring to the work they do on something like CSS Zen Garden. How do they do this? What thought process do they go through? How much trial and error is there? What tools ultimately come into play beyond Notepad? How long does it take to do one of these designs?

I want to learn the relationship between that blank document in Notepad and a Movable Type weblog that uses a set of templates, plugins and scripts to produce an end result that validates, is accessible and meets the expectations of today’s web experts in these areas. Mostly, I want to know that when I make entries to a Movable Type weblog that has been designed with those things in mind, I’m not ”invalidating” the work with each and every entry.

Then, it hit me. There’s an alternative to staring at a wall of books about web design, XHTML and CSS at the bookstore. I can’t select the good from the bad or the accurate from the inaccurate there. I simply can’t know which is which.

However, I can look at web sites such as these:

What I’m doing by ”limiting” myself to these resources is narrowing the universe of opinions, suggestions and prescriptions to a manageable set that I can trust. It’s a little like selecting a single university from all available, then selecting a college or department within that university and then selecting a major from the many possibilities.

Tools that will come into play for me are:

So what prompted all of this? I’ve had too many masters. I’ve had too many ”trains of thought.” I’ve confused learning with browsing. Most of this became apparent when I realized just how much help I can get from Shirley Kaiser’s sites alone. Websitetips.com is full of tutorials, tips, essays and the like.

I didn’t realize that such deep resources were in there until she got robbed. Between the tools and resources listed in this entry, a little help from some friends and some focus, I’m going to gain some skills with this stuff.

Now, all we need is a syllabus that takes us through these things in a meaningful and logical order!

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  1. — Shirley Kaiser    28 September 2003, 01:04    #

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