School and the web
Posted on 22 August 2006 (02:09 PM)
What has always bugged me is the way I've been educated in building web pages. I think it's great the Web Standard Project has formed a task force for improving that particular case.
In my first year, I was taught how to create websites using frames and the WYSIWYG editor Dreamweaver. We're not even talking tables here, we're talking frames and we're talking the year 2003. Not a single line of HTML was hand-written in the first page I created. Purely out of interest and motivation, I went searching beyond and found tags, attributes and whatnot and I thaught myself the right way.
As a side-note, I oughtta mention that this school I was attending was neither a programming nor an IT training. It thaught Multimedia. Therefore, they provided lessons in Photoshop, Illustrator, photography, video editing et cetera. Webdesign was only a small part of the package. Nevertheless, a lot of people in my year really wanted to get a job in webdesign or development. So there you have it: a couple of dozen graduates all being very fond of the internet, with not a single clue what web standards or web accessibility mean.
Of course, I can't speak for all schools in the Netherlands, but I think the very first thing one oughtta be taught is writing one's own HTML. Not knowing what HTML-tags and attributes mean and do is harmful, considering accessibility and usability. As a matter of fact, webdevelopment studies should start with accessibility. After all, websites are all about content, and serving this content in an accessible manner should be first priority.
Anyway, this is a rant I wanted to write down for a long time, I guess I feel kind of cheated in a way. Go, WaSP! Hopefully things will change for future students.
Filed under Industry and Culture
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Comments:
You seem to have had a bad experience. But the clue, and you even admit it, was that you were not on an IT or computing course, but an arts course. These are not usually technically minded people at all. I on the other hand did take a computing course and we did write HTML by hand for the first couple of weeks. Of course as a means of teaching this is fraught with problems - does your page look bad because you have the wrong tags, or the wrong attributes or have you made a typo in the tags or attributes. Or a bad design? And you can only enter in what you can remember. But by moving on to Dreamweaver AFTER learning a bit about tags, I was then not limited to the tags or attributes I could remember. Then I could examine the HTML and see how the code was written by DW, and have all the options available infront of me in DW.
Then I could move back to the slow slow hand-coding approach, but use it to edit the code produced by DW. And eventually to use CSS. Back in 1999...
The real problem is letting arts people teach a technical subject, and not that schools in general are doing it wrong. If you wish to do web design or development, take the correct course.