Personal Web Page Developments

Near the end of the previous millennium my internet provider brought ADSL connections to the market and I subscribed to the service. No more dial in connections with a modem over the phone line. With the service came an email address with a couple of aliases and the possibility to host your own personal homepage. In the beginning I didn’t use the homepage option. As time went by I started to think about the possibility of using a homepage as a ‘diary’ to keep family living abroad informed of what was going on on my end. That kind of got me started with html. Software to write web pages were still expensive and searching the internet was quite painful and slow even with ADSL compared to today’s standards. So I bought a book and taught myself the basics of HTML. It was a Visual Quickstart Guide from PeachPit by Elizabeth Castro. The division between content with HTML and styling through CSS was already covered but still html was full of tags to style your page. To complicate matters for starters and amateurs like myself there was a lack of consistent support of standards by browsers and numerous browser specific extensions to HTML. As a ‘result’ I never got into learning CSS. I played around with some Javascript to animate menu’s etcetera but used tags available in HTML to style my page. Adhering to standards and accessibility were not in scope at the time. And you could only view web pages on a computer so adapting the style to different devices was also not a problem yet. Then came platforms like WordPress which took away the need to know much about HTML and CSS. For my work I maintained a couple of pages to centralise certain information but here again there was no need to know more than the basics and styling was kept to a minimum.

Today, after a gap of 15 years not looking at HTML much I find myself returning to the topic. Via via I came to this resource from Shay Howe to learn HTML 5 and CSS. It is free and interactive and there is also an eBook you can buy if you like. So far I have read the first 3 chapters and just reading the few pages of chapter 3 introducing CSS have transformed my knowledge about the subject (not hard considering my very limited knowledge so far). But the book is well organised and also well written. In parallel I have been reading the Wrox HTML 4,01 Programmer’s Reference which I found back on my shelf untouched. Compared to the book from Shay going through the reference is a bit of an ordeal, and obviously outdated on top of that. Reading both it makes clear what has changed between HTML 4 and 5 so there is some use to it and as references go this has lists of all the possible options of attribute values. After I have finished reading the reference I will probably get rid of it as the modern day equivalent is doing an internet search. I will miss having all information together in one place and will search for the same information multiple times but the space freed up on my shelf already has many candidates waiting, currently stacked in several piles throughout the house.