Learning HTML Code

[Pablo Phoenix]

Hey guys,

I am very interested in starting to do serious web design, but I am not sure how to go about learning HTML code. I realize there a quite a few good WYSIWYG editors out there, but I would really like to learn how to the code by hand.

If any of you experienced HTML editors could give me some hints, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks so much!

Keith Turner

[horace]

My advice would be, learn how to do it by hand - look at the source of pages to see how they have been done, and, above all, make sure your pages validate using the tools provided by W3C. 99% of pages out there are not valid html, so you should soon be well ahead!

[matthew]

Take a look at this as a starting point.

http://make-a-web-site.com/

[expatCM]

yes, hand coding is certainly the way to understand but it can also be a little frustrating since it takes time to see the results......

To get a site up and running in an instant have you considered having a look at Joomla? This is a content management system which more or less gives you a site out of the box :)
http://www.joomla.com/
You would be up and running with a site to explore in a very short time.

To run Joomla on a local machine (rather than a remote server) you will need to install Lampp (which is known as Xampp in Windows) and then install Joomla under that.
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html

Not hard. Even I can do it so it has to be easy :)

[Pablo Phoenix]

I do appreciate the reply, but I'm really not looking for easy. I know how to do easy. I've done quite a bit of NVU design and other stuff like that, but I would really rather learn the code. It is the most effective way to design, and I want that.

Horace, could you please explain to me what W3C is? I have not heard of that but it sounds very interesting.

Thanks a lot guys!

Keith

[matthew]

A few other things for you to look at.

http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/html/

This is probably what was being referred to with W3C. Overall, W3C is a standards organization, advocating for specific standards on the web. This link will allow a person to test their site and see if it conforms to agreed upon standards.

http://validator.w3.org/

[Pablo Phoenix]

Very cool. Thanks a lot. This looks like really good stuff. Thanks for the fast replies.


Keith

[metromari]

A great book to learn with is "HTML for the World Wide Web" by Elizabeth Castro. It has great illustrations and teaches you to write code by hand. It also teaches CSS, which is essential these days. You can probably get it used for real cheap, or of course you can get a brand new copy. I keep it handy whenever I have to dust off my HTML skills.

If you really want to learn HTML, just write it by hand in your favorite text editor. If you use a fancy HTML editor, you spend less time learning HTML and more time learning to use a fancy editor.

[flossgeek]

Good I'm glad you want to learn the code because so many web programmers out there rely on there wysiwigs and have no bloody clue. Coding by hand may be longer but it will get better results, as it can be fine tuned without the frustration of unefficient code added by an IDE.

You know what Gedit would suffice for your development, or something like Jedit.

[barmazal]

First learn to code HMTL/XHTML/CSS by hand on text editor with syntax highlighting and then move to application with intellisense and code competition to code 3 times faster.
I highly advice to take a look what is DOM and Javascript as well if you indent to make proper static(without user/owner interaction) website.

try both of these at the beginning

http://www.w3schools.com/
http://www.cssplay.co.uk/

Start with it, it should take half year or so to get into design. Learn bit of SEO, Web Accessibility and Usability and you can start with dynamic development which is far more complex since it requires programming of databases and functionality so users can interact with website (ie. this forum allows us to post and based of one of most known forum PHP based content managment systems for forums by vBulletin)