----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 09, 2010 6:37 PM
Subject: Re: Lisa C and Lisa FORTRAN
On May 9, 2010, at 1:17 PM, John Foust wrote:
This has
been going on for a while, and it's maddening. "HTML
programming" is a term I hear with some frequency. Cluelessness
abounds.
You have a better term for the hodgepodge of tools and languages
used in contemporary webs? Maybe "web developer"?
Yes, that term is accurate. It is not programming.
Who gets hired for knowing only HTML and not any
ancillary language
to go along with it?
Actually, very few people get hired for even knowing HTML, because
most web developers don't know HTML. The vast majority of HTML on
the WWW today, easily 95% is program-generated. I'm not talking
about dynamic sites, I'm talking about authoring tools like
Dreamweaver. Writing HTML in an editor is considered "old school"
and today's web developers call it, incorrectly, "programming".
You can usually tell program generated HTML from hand-coded HTML. With the
former,
each HTML tag is on a new line, whereas with the latter the code is in a
format specific to the user. For example, when doing tables I usually group
the Table Row and Table Data/Header tags on the same lines.
It would be interesting to see how many web developers could actually
correct HTML code, should an error occur.
I self-taught myself HTML code back in 2000, simply by looking at the source
of some webpages and making a few notes. Now, I use HTML guide websites to
keep up with the newer tags that come about, though I do very little HTML
coding these days (my website hasn't been updated in a few years, and
Geocities has officially closed anyway), except for my 'Infobase' (an
offline collection of pages with useful information regarding computers,
which I use as guides).
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk