Learning HTML : Day One

I’ve been asked by a client/friend, to help his daughter build a website. She’s building it, while I will look over it and offer advice. She has “The HTML Bible”, but I’m thinking of offering a couple of other book suggestions. She’s new to this, but she’s bright and could pick up quickly.
I’m not ready to suggest CSS to her, but it’s probably better in the long run. The initial learning curve of CSS tends to make me shy away from even suggesting it while she learns HTML.
I think that learning on something like FrontPage isn’t bad….so long as you don’t use the built-in scripts. You can build tables and get the general idea of how to build a page…..learning about bloated code can come later.
My recommendations are more like generalizations about designing & building on the web. Because I never really learned HTML from a book, but by dissecting the code of sites I liked. The books were more of a dictonaryesque resource. I got a lot more out of concept books.

So far I’m suggesting:
“Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug
Instead of building these huge complex sites, why not build one that’s simple to use? Steve has a lot of good insight on how to make the web easier and more accessible to use.
“Homepage Usability – 50 Websites Deconstructed” by Jakob Nielsen & Marie Thair
Jakob can be an accessibility windbag, but in this book he (and Marie) give great examples of large business sites and some of the design mistakes they’ve made. Plus the book goes into more of the concept of why it’s smart to have the search form on the right and the logo on the left.
Those two are probably a couple of my favorites, and would have also suggested “Creating Killer Web Sites” by David Siegal, but it’s becoming *very* outdated. I haven’t looked into Zeldman’s book yet, but along with it and his site and the ALA site along with Evolt….there probably more for a higher beginner that someone starting stone cold. Plus the evolt mailing list isn’t exactly friendly to newbies (too many RTFM-type comments).
So I’m actually posting this to see what other html educational books and resources some of you might have? Don’t want to overwhelm her, but just want her to know more about what she’s diving into.

This entry was posted by 2000-2005 on Friday, January 9th, 2004 at 10:01 am. It is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

10 Responses to “Learning HTML : Day One”

  1. I recommended the XHTML Visual Quickstart Guide to my sister, a college freshman, who wanted to start learning how to build a website.

  2. OK, you probably hate people like me for this — but who not just direct her to a free blogger account? I know it’s like the AOL version of — blogging? — but really it probably has most everything someone needs for a starter site. plus — free. … unless she really wants to learn all the tech stuff – but i think a lot of people on the web want the tech part to be easy so they can focus on the content creation.

  3. Mike, I don’t have any book suggestions but wanted to address your decision not to dive right into CSS. I wonder how much of the percieved learning curve is because we were forced to unlearn methods required by the lack of browser support for CSS not too many years ago?
    Now that browser support makes it practical, I imagine that for someone just starting out that CSS in conjunction with [X]HTML wouldn’t be that much of a problem. Provided the eventual goal is to write well crafted pages, emphasizing the seperation of style from content at the beginning may save her a lot of grief down the road.
    BTW, nice job with the Erlanger updates. I noticed this morning that CNN had used your site as a primary source for a report on Jones.

  4. I spoke to her over a year ago, when she first started floating around the webpage idea, and told her about Blogger. She’s took notes and such but I don’t think it sunk in. It’s a good starting point, like AOL, but she seems to want to learn html (ahh youth). I’ll bring it up again…..
    Really if she can just write a link a href or an image tag, that’s a start and something like Blogger would work.

  5. Personally I think Dreamweaver 2004 is a far superior product to Frontpage. It definitely has better code generation, internal rendering, and seems to generate standards compliant code. WYS is actually WYG. Not sure what the difference in price is. I’d also recommend TopStyle Pro ($80) but it’s just code, no WYSIWYG editing.
    With a modern editing application there is no need to shy away from CSS, even with a newbie. Both TopStyle and Dreamweaver have very simple ways of editing the properties of any object. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what “border” and “font-color” mean. She might as well learn the current approach to things. Teaching HTML without CSS is asking a student to step into a time machine.
    Stay away from the Zeldman books. Neither are of any use to a beginner. Though, a book with a simpler standards compliant approach would be a helpful reference. I think it’s best to approach HTML more creatively than like a language one must learn. A young person is likely to pick tags up quickly. It’s design that is tricky.
    Curious to know, why does she want to use HTML? What is her goal? Anyway, good luck!

  6. I have to second Al’s suggestion. Until August of this year I’d had absolutely zero knowledge about html or web design at all but teaching myself CSS definately helped a lot more. From the people I’ve talked to who’ve done this for a long time, it seems like the difficulty of learning CSS is mainly in unlearning old habits. As a complete newbie to the whole thing I have to say the CSS seems to make a lot more sense to me than just normal markup.

  7. This is more of a placeholder, I’ll expand on this later.
    When I talk about learning html first, I’m not talking about adding font tags and nested tables, just structure and the “proper” use of html. If she has to create a structure/frame out of a table, as sometimes you have to do, then I want her to know the correct way to do it.
    Maybe it was because I (and like a lot of you said) had to un-learn bad html to learn css, but I just remember thinking what a bunch of nonsense CSS was to learn and work with. Sure now I’d love to do it, but starting out…it’s a headache. But I will steer her toward CSS, probably by showing her the CSS O’Reiley book and directing her toward glish and some of the web tutorials with just a warning about browser bugs.
    Like I said, I’ll expand on this when I can….

  8. Yeah, Siegel’s book is *very* outdated, but I like some of the concepts (like wireframes and basic css) and his discussion of the color cube. I wouldn’t suggest it to her, mainly because it’s sooo old.
    Philip & Alex’s is a pretty good book, I forgot about it until Dan mentioned it.

  9. Wow, your mention of the Siegel book (http://www.killersites.com/) rang all sorts of alarm bells for me; that’s the book that suggested entrance tunnels and similar horrid stuff. I’d run screaming from that and anything Zeldman just because of the usability issues of the sites created by those guys; he’s gotten better in recent years, but I’ve used previous incarnations of WebStandards.org (http://www.webstandards.org/) as an example of “do you want your site to look like that?” for various newbies, and after the screams of “Ow, my eyes! Make it stop!” we’ve reverted to simpler schemes.
    I’d start with the “HTML in 21 minutes” chapter from Philip & Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing, which is also available online (http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/) . Going from that, introducing tables for tabular data (and more stuff is tabular than the CSS zealots would like you to think), and then offering up CSS for anything that’s not tabular that they absolutely feel they must have position control over is probably a good way to come up with a decent, usable site.
    I’d also encourage anyone building HTML sites for a business to spend two or three days (yes, at least that long) shopping online for products like theirs, or supplies for their business. When I laid out Delightfully Cherished (http://www.delightfullycherished.com/) (warning: no nudity, in fact no humans in any pictures, but it is bondage gear, albeit velvet and silk) I suggested a few tricks and flashy things and colors and layout hacks, but the proprietor shot most of ‘em down because she’d spent enough time finding suppliers and buying components online that she always preferred the simple to the flashy.
    (And, interestingly, the link text to a given page always had to be the same…)

  10. I’ll second the visual quickstart book, as long as it’s the 5th (most recent) edition. I was a beta-tester on that book, and I was impressed with the clarity and organization.