Creativity Sparked from Reality...

Antique University History of WebWonking or HTML and CSS Theory as Modified by the Logistics of Reality....(my personal HTML History)

Greetings Esteemed Readers,

Recently I tumbled back to an epoch when I knew HTML well and wrote thousands of lines of code for webpages using it. I invested many days sitting in front of arrays of monitors checking the results of code under a variety of configurations (operating system X browser X screen resolution). Each code edit required refreshing each system individually. It was not as archaic as swapping various floppies to start a computer, run the computer, run a program, save the work, and print the result (1990) but it was a world very different from what we know today.

To peek back check my text based webpage (also shown below) with tables in the Wayback Machine (links may or may not open in a new tab)

While my presence on the web goes further back many of my archived pages now have broken image links..

ConchShells (again shown below) is a webpage I wrote in 2001 showing tables with linked images.

Eventually an online subscription program became available that checked code under numerous configurations with a single click. It then produced screenshots for all the configurations selected. That service save countless hours and allowed developers to proliferate as they then needed only one computer to produce webpages viewable by most people on the net.

It used to be essential to understand and write HTML to make even basic webpages

The following issues made HTML fluency essential to web developers in the past.

Software was very glitchy

HTML editors could be platform or browser specific

Web authoring software was often browser specific

Some code was interpreted differently by different browsers

People kept computers longer because they cost so much

There was a great range of system capabilities on the internet

It did not take much to overwhelm older computers

Some systems crashed just from visiting a webpage that opened a second program (My first computer capable of going online had > 1500 times less ram and 10,000 less memory than a current (2020) high end cell phone)

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets or Consistent Setup Smarts?

The advent of CSS specification (1996), adoption (2000-2005) and effective implementation (@2007) changed the process of web development significantly. That did not happen in my webwonking days. Struggling with the outcomes at that time however did lead me to a major philosophical tenet:"Less is More". Comparing the 1967 book "The Medium is the Massage" (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967) to many CSS based websites published in 2007 (40 years later!) favorably exemplifies the less is more principle.

Check the tutorial link for CSS training through CSSZenGarden that clearly demonstrates the power of CSS, which spurred me to look again at the websites I return to on a daily basis. Few are presented as beautifully as any of the ZG renditions, yet all are more intuitively functional than the vast majority of the ZG examples.

The sites I use on a regular basis have all determined that functionality is more essential than beauty to their viewer base. Consistency is a key to functionality. The sites I use all have numerous links to easily and rapidly get me the information I want. One of the highly functional aspects of CSS is that it can be used to effectively to ensure all links are current (or removed) on an entire web. When maintaining hundreds of pages on a website, this was the tremendous advantage I hoped CSS would solve when I was maintaining my websites.

Coding in HTML or CSS? What did I learn new? This exercised reminded me of many things but I intentionally did not focus on relearning HTML here because it is not something I am likely to use. Let me tell you why I do not want to develop webpages using HTML:

Increased RAM allows much more complex instruction processing

Code no longer needs to be parsimonious

Bandwidth today is a river compared to a trickle yesterday

Writing basic HTML is relatively boring yet time consuming unless it is just a quick exercise like this

Writing advanced HTML is fraught with pitfalls and very time consuming

Now there are programs that can do what used to take days in seconds! USE THEM!!!

If you are going to publish a website consider the following:

Standardization of CSS and HTML has been achieved decreasing historic display errors

Now software can produce both HTML and CSS code quicker and with fewer errors than people can

Code editors are available for fraction of the cost of the time it would take to learn how to do what the program will do

Free websites offer a variety of website building tools that are easier to use than learning to code

You can rent cloud service latest web development software very inexpensively

Today knowing HTML is handy when problems in text editors arise or I want to figure out a problem by looking at the root, but outside of that it is like learning Latin to understand English better. Knowing Latin is helpful but there are many other much more effective ways to improve English skills! While full-time web developers still need to be very versatile in HTML today the rest of us need only a cursory knowledge of it.

Hu, LMFT, LPCC, SCPM

References

McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The Medium is the Massage. New York: Random House

Hu's Abbreviated CV