My brother picked up his books for Uni this week, and I was flicking through one of the HTML ones when I saw this…
Oh it’s totally ‘e’, for sure.
I had to refrain from burning one of the many HTML books he had to purchase this week, it has only 5 pages dedicated to CSS and a whopping 25 pages to tables. It irritates me that he has to pay $200 for a bunch of outdated and poorly written books, when he could learn everything he needs to know about HTML online.
Will they ever start teaching web standards?
Kitta.net 
You know what? I’ve wondered about this before… And then I started day-dreamin’ about this little student teaching his web design teacher what web standards are.
Tell your brother to start a rebellion!
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This why they have Rule 2 Of Uni Life
Rule 1: There are no tutes in week one.
Rule 2: Dont buy textbooks until week three, at the earliest. This ensures that you dont buy books you dont need. Like ones with outdated material. Or ones which are essentially re-printed into the lecture notes. Or ones your sister could write off the top of her head.
Rule 3: Summarise, Summarise, Summarise.
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Most of the good HTML coders I’ve known have been liberal arts majors and not CS/IT people. I guess I know why now.
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This also reminds me of a time I worked at a place that used akamai to host images. We were having problems getting some images to display and I was on the phone with one of their tech guys. During the “troubleshooting”, he asked me to verify the IP address of a server. Quoth he: “It should be 192.168…”
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I did intro to multimedia at murdoch last sem. as a prerequisite and I bought the books. I think I opened one once to get a quote. And I bought the history book to study for the exam… And having spent the last week in hospital too (appendix) I now understand your previous fears about dry toast. Hope you are all better now.
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Sometimes I really wonder if they ever will. My school offers a web design class which only mentions inline CSS for about a paragraph and doesn’t touch at all on the idea of asthetics. When will the community learn that designing with web standards and CSS is easier, better supported and faster!?!?!
Ok, I’ll have to avoid ranting again… grr.
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What kind of class is that book for?
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I taught web development at uni last year (as part of a multimedia degree) and I was responsible for changing all the tutorials/resource material from html to xhtml. We also had an emphasis on css, web standards and good design principles. Both major assignments had to validate with the w3c.org validator before submission. Not all uni courses are the same!
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Hmmmm you sure its not A lol no matter what you always can learn from books
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What’s IP? Is it a disease?
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Hi kitta,
you always can learn form any book something.
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Man, I used to use alot of tables to achive the look I wanted. Now tables to me are rarely used.
(Oh, by the way.. I think you mean “refrain” instead of “reframe”)
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Meato, he’s first year, so he wanted to buy all his books before he starts and read them. He’ll learn.
JK, yes most good web developers have degrees from other areas. Self taught seems the way to go.
Roxy, they’re for a multimedia and internet unit.
Raina, Nice to see some change. 😀 Which Uni did you teach at and how did the students take to it?
Aaron, yes I did mean ‘refrain’, I only noticed the mistake this morning.
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All this time, Kitta, and you still cant spell my name 😛
I know the first-year phenomena. We all fall for it. I only barely managed to talk my own brother out of it.
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ok, hotshots – what’s the answer?
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Oh god. Don’t get me started. I took a web design course at the community college that I go to because I was looking for an easy A. I was sorely dissapointed in what I found. The class was being taught on an older version of Microsoft FrontPage and the results that I saw everyone else cranking out made me freel like it was suddenly 1997 again, and more than half of the sites he was showing us actually WERE circia 1997.
It was the only time in the history of my education that I honestly felt that I could get up in front of the class and teach it 100% more effectively and more current than the professor could.
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SCU (Northern NSW) .. the students’ reactions were mixed – some jumped in and got inspired by some of the ‘for interest’ sites to which I sent them – such as CSS Zen Garden, A List Apart, and Simplebits. Some were not happy that I was being ‘so pendantic’ about each file having to validate. The first couple of weeks were definitely the worst complaints-wise but by the end most saw the plus side of being careful about separation of content/presentation and decided they were glad we had pushed them a little in the first place.
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haha I’m taking a class like that. we had a book on the web and its copyright date was 1999. entirely way outdated, and some person even asked the teacher why we were using the book, and she really had no answer.
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I’m in a course called Advanced Web Programming. It’s definitely not advanced, but it does enforce standards compliant design (XHTML + CSS). In fact, you lose 10% off of each assignment that doesn’t validate. You also lose points if your design doesn’t meet certain accessibility guidelines.
Basically, it sounds like your brother is just getting shafted a wee bit.
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I took ‘Electronic Publishing” at QUT a few years back, and for what was essentially an introduction/intermediate course, it had a stong emphasis on CSS, XHTML the semantic web, accessability and cross-browser interoperability.
The lecturer (David Irvine) exclusively used Macs, whereas I am a linux user, and the uni was naturally very Windows reliant, so it made for some great discussions. In fact, 5% of our marks were given for a weekly presentation in which we found a site that was poorly designed and explained why it is bad, and how it could be improved.
I have to say, some students found it a little bit of a struggle after being so used to dreamweaver, but I personally loved it. The fact that this was over two years ago, and yet crappy courses with outdated info are still being taught is disappointing.
It’s 2005 people. You don’t see “Modern Programming” teaching fortran or cobol, and the same should apply to web markup. Table-based layouts and inline-styles need to go the way of the dodo.
End rant.
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wow… that’s funny and depressing. Oh well, back to work porting my site to WP 1.5
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There is a place for inline styles. Depending on the design, which the coder doesn’t always have control over, sometimes it just makes sense to to pop in an inline style than make another entry into a style sheet. If the time comes to completely refresh the look of a site, you often end up having to recode portions of the html anyway. Most (make that, all that I’ve met) designers don’t take content portability into account when doing designs and the coder who actually does the work often has only minimal input. At the very least, navigation usually completely changes.
Another situation you often end up in is having to use inline styles is when you’re barred from making any changes to the client’s style sheet. This is something i’ve run into when working on a client’s site. They wanted a certain typographical look in some text blocks that wasn’t doable in their existing style sheet. They also had a policy that barred *any* changes to the style sheet. Our only recourse was to do inline styles.
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Stephen, you are kidding aren’t you?
Nikkiana, I know what you mean. Years ago I enrolled in a web design course and I have also studied some multimedia. I too felt like I could teach to class more effectively than the lecturer.
Raina, that’s good to hear and good on you for pushing the students and not backing down on validation.
Mark, he’s doing games programming not web programming, so there’s only basic web programming included. Which is a pity, it would have been nice to borrow his php books afterwards.
Adam, the weekly presentation sounds like a good idea, a lot of web design is based on re-designs, so it’s good to practice. I agree, the fact that outdated information is still being taught is disappointing.
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That’s almost as bad as my php book 😡
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All of the above?
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I am currently doing different exams for win2003 server. You are right. It is better to be self taught, I think you also have a bit more motivation. About your latest web cam image…I must say…WOW!! 🙂
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Wild guess… community college?
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Anthony, wild guess wrong. We don’t have community college’s here, our equivalent is TAFE and he’s doing a University degree, not a TAFE diploma.
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Hey! there is nothing wrong with community colleges/TAFE. I goto tafe and man, I’m so glad I do.
I’m doing the web development diploma, and we are strictly taught web standards at all times.
Loving learning PHP 😀
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well i feel bad i recently dropped my web programming class because i had a problem with my teacher. she wouldn’t listen to me that i knew a little more then she did the fact that she was about 80 years old and still did stuff like it was 1999 and i could make a wonderful designed site including nothing more then div and lists and css she did everything in one page, and did something that is my number one pet peeve not declaring the background, she told everyone quote, “unless you don’t want the color white as your background no need to declare it” well see i do something i turn my background to lime green or maroon red, just change your browsers background color to see, and head over to http://yahoo.com/ to prove my point annoying aint it.
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