My 10-year-old daughter had expressed interest in knowing what the letters “H T M & L” stood for a few days ago. When she initially asked me I was so stretched and tired from a very long day and the letters sounded familiar but … hmmm. What was she asking about?
I put her off, feeling really stupid, and during the night, after some rest and waking up, I clicked on what she had asked. Duh, HTML Hyper Text Markup Lang. gee whiz I must have been really tired. I mean really.
I grew up with typewriters and fat televisions. My first contact with a computer was this strange box with a tiny window that used “floppies” to save information you typed into it. They were big soft 5″+ black things. That was in college.
The next few years I had contact with better computing, but in the form of some network shell of WordPerfect, and I immediately grasped how to use it and loved coding nice pages to print out. Others in the office had to go to classes to learn things and they came back telling me this and that and I’d show them easier ways to do things than they had learned.
Another office where I worked had WYSIWYG computers, in other words: macintosh computers. They were fun, but took the challenge of coding a perfect looking paper to print out.
Later I worked where PC’s were more common and I transferred my early WordPerfect understanding to PC Windows Word Perfect programs and setup cool forms and made pages for a company I worked at for a month.
More and more history with computers, usually finding macs as the WYSIWYG sort, and I eventually came to Desktop Publishing for my church. It was using Adobe PageMaker and I got the job never having used any program like that before. I learned it super fast and excelled at squishing everything into the monthly paper and making it look nice.
That job ended because I finally was expecting my first baby. That happened when I literally just started the job, unknown to me for a month. So once that was known my hubby and I went out and got our very own home PC. An HP Pavilion with 16 MB of memory. 1 Gig hard drive. It was a good computer. Sounds funny from this end of things. Anyhow with that came the internet. Before that we hadn’t gone online ever. Never.
We had AOL to start with and as soon as I could I was up and running with a web page. I learned HTML from various sources and had different pages here and there … we moved to GA from FL and moved away from AOL to the REAL internet. I had more websites. Things changed here and there, but one constant stayed: we were online and I had websites that I made things for, wrote for, updated.
Something called CSS started and I took to that. I love CSS but don’t understand it to the nth degree I could. One thing with that is that I started using Blogger in 2002 and then switched to Moveable Type when I had a better hosting situation. I still had my websites I did stuff with besides blogging. I eventually moved to Word Press which was pre-.7 something or other at the time. As it has grown, my site coding has diminished. I used to customize templates to the hilt, but have gone back to the simpler way as I have here, using VeryPlainText fairly stock, with plugins and some hand coding in the sidebar or for pages on the different sites I run.
So then my daughter started bugging me about something I told her about, a good site to learn HTML from.
I finally gave her this link: http://w3schools.com
Yesterday she spent some time on the computer and went through all the lessons for HTML on that site. She told me when she was done, and I helped her to organize space on the computer to create with.
I had her make a new folder and in it had her make a “new text file”. I had her open the file and coached her through what goes where at the top and bottom and talked about nesting codes and being sure to type them correctly and to always end the codes.
I showed her to “save as …’ that file and then a new webpage will be in that folder, if she saves it with a .html extension, that is, and the “new text file” will stay there ready for a fresh start every time, as long as she uses “save as …” correctly.
She made her first webpage, just a simple page, one line of text, no formatting. It was sense of accomplishment that she had though.
No longer am I the only web author, she is one now too, in training, but definitely a web author.
I spent some time making a new sub-domain for her and my eldest, Russell, and will setup blogs for them, and they’ll have space to put hand coded pages.
I have been stimulated through this to start hand coding some things again. I really like simple web sites, they can be very rich to look at really. Simplicity in design. I had a reinventing of myself with this same thing some years ago, and Word Press has made me LAZY! I love WP still and will continue to. I just want to get some other stuff going again as well.
It’s a decent thing to use software to make something, but it’s like knowing how to drive an automatic car only. Driving a manual car brings greater knowledge of driving to an individual, in my opinion, as does knowing how to build a basic webpage from HTML & CSS.
So my daughter as taken the plunge in learning a new language. I’ll have my eldest son doing the same soon too.