Wed 30 Mar 2005
Over Winter Study I taught a course on HTML. For all of you who wonder how Dave gets his quoted paragraphs offset and turned yellow, or how he links to other pages, or how Aidan makes people’s names bold, or how I post pictures — or if (gasp) you want to make a Web page of your own — well, I have written a tutorial for you. The Internet already provides many HTML tutorials, but none (at least, none that I have found) that concisely guide you from not knowing anything about HTML to having a page with just about anything you want on it.
Here is my HTML tutorial. Go forth and do good.
I realize that many Ephs already know HTML, and for those who do, the contents of this tutorial will seem obvious. But HTML is easy enough to learn that I think it is useful to know it, since most of us use the Internet daily, and it is nice to know the structure of the Internet: just how it is that the page you’re reading got to look that way (though EphBlog is more complex than basic HTML). Dreamweaver may be easy, but it creates ugly code, and it reveals nothing of the inner workings of the Internet. For that, you need HTML. Here it is.
March 31st, 2005 at 9:19 am
A very clear tutorial. As you note, you cover the essentials, as opposed to most books, which figure the fatter the book the more they can charge.
Although hard to believe as a student, Free University courses can come in really handy later in life. I graduated in 1975, during the worst recession since the Great Depression. Unemployment was running around 12%. After a nerve-wracking Spring, I finally took a job at John Hancock as a life insurance underwriter.
I remember asking the Senior VP of Underwriting several years after the fact why he’d hired me. He said, “Well, Guy, I remember on your resume that you’d put down “Juggling” as a skill.” (I’d taken a course at the Free University on juggling and was actually pretty good in those days.) “I hired you because I figured anybody who had the balls to put that down on their resume had to be a pretty interesting fellow.”