In My Experience... | I know HTML. Phear me. (1467)

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I know HTML. Phear me.
[ Posted by Dan on December 31, 2002 | 2 Comments ]

Several years ago my informal career manager (my brother) was quizzing me on the future of my skill set and where I thought I should be headed in my career. He's no fool and knows technology rolls over faster than a well trained dog. So while looking forward, and with sounds of XML working drafts in the background, he asked me...

Don't you think you should learn XML? Because HTML might go away soon.

To which I replied...

Well, there's currently billions of HTML documents out there in the world, and many of those will likely turn into XML someday, so learning XML will be a good idea. But HTML parsing web browsers are going to be around for a while, because that millions of HTML docs just don't evaporate suddenly.

To this day, I write HTML that's better than Dreamweaver's output, or any other gooey editor's output. I've read the O'Reilly XML book, and it is indeed a morass, but it's a morass worth learning, but ginsu HTML skills are still good to have.

It's like most any new technology - it takes time for the new to replace the old. Look at how long it took Win95 to overcome its Win3.11/DOS heritage, among other things.

I personally know HTML/CSS very well, but I haven't looked into XML one bit. I should do that, and that O'Reilly book you linked to looks like an excellent place to start.

-Posted by milbertus on December 31, 2002 05:14 PM

OK, for those of you that don't "know" XML, here is the scoop that the books won't tell you (because then you wouldn't buy them).

To learn XML:

(drumroll please...)

Close your tags.

Seriously, that is 90% of it.

Now granted there are lots of other things like schemas, dtd's, namespaces, etc, but don't kill yourself learning the ins and outs of that stuff unless you are an actual programmer (no offense intended to HTML "programmers"). Designers/page authors will spend the vast majority of their time working within a pre-defined schema so you will simply end up learning that through the validation tools. The tool will say "The person element requires a name element" or something.

Now on the other hand, if you are programming with XML, get the books, a bottle of excedrin, and a tin of chamomile tea because you are in for a maddeningly convoluted learning process as you sift through the morass of shoddy explanations and examples.

P.S. As you pointed out, HTML is not going away soon, or even later. It will still be here in 5 years guaranteed and in technology that is synonymous with forever. If you want to be cutting edge, look into XHTML, XForms, SVG, and CSS3.

-Posted by Eric on January 2, 2003 12:24 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).