HTML's not so bad...

My first real experience with HTML came during 504 last summer. I am certainly still a novice, however, to this point find HTML fairly easy to work with and not intimidating. Of course, I'm basing this on the very simple websites we've been required to produce to this point, so my rosy assessment could quickly change if future assignments involve complicated HTML coding. But, so far at least, I'm having some fun with it.

This week I focused on reviewing the Powerpoint from 504, and followed it in creating my unit 6 web page (which looks quite similar to my 504 page). So far in SIRLS, I've been required to produce a web page about every 6 months. This is often enough to remember some basics, but too infrequent to become comfortable with the process - particularly in posting them to the U-System account. I'm sure DigIn will afford many future opportunities to create websites, so the process will undoubtedly become more familiar. Right now, for some reason, I always lack confidence that the transfer of files to the U-System account will go smoothly, and fear the page will be missing elements that are present when viewing the document during creation. Images, especially, I'm afraid won't be transferred properly and I'll be left with a page full of the dreaded "X" symbol.

I also viewed lessons from the w3schools.com website. These are helpful, easy to understand, valuable for reinforcing what I already know, and present new concepts in a manner that is accessible to the layperson. So far I'm sticking to the basic lessons, but plan to revisit the more advanced ones as we proceed through the course. A couple little things surprised me. For instance, future versions of HTML won't allow you to skip certain end tags that can be missing now (although it's not recommended). This only surprised me because I imagined rules might become more flexible as the code evolved, not less. Also, I'm still not clear on the differences between HTML, XHTML, and XML. From what I've seen, the code for each looks fairly similar. I believe XML prioritizes data content over style, although this is certainly an oversimplification.