My Experience With HTML/CSS

My initial experience with HTML actually began three years before it was even invented. In 1987, I was a tcgh writer for Amoco, which used a tag-based language callled SGML to be able to print documentation. It was a wearingly language, particularly when compared to the WYSIWYG nature of personal computer based programs such as Aldust PageMaker. But I was constrained to dumb ol' mainframes, and there wasn't yet a WYSIWYG editor for IBM mainframes yet. I was stuck with SGML.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me at the time, a guy named Tim Berners-Lee must have been stuck with SGML, too, because when he created the World Wide Web, he stole most of SGML in order to create something called the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). When I first saw HTML, I recognized it as most of the old SGML and knew I could just step into HTML without any problem.

I actually lost some jobs a few years kater because I didn't "know" programs like Dreamweaver. They didn't understand that I knew how to code HTML from scratch and diddn't need to know Dreamweaver. I could already code HTML much cleaner from scratch.

Ariund the turn of the millenium, the rest of SGML finally arrived, in the form of XML. The whole internet might have turned in that direction, via XHTML, but cooler heads prevailed and we wound up with the more useful and less=strict HTML5 instead. It introduced Audio and Video tags, as well as Canvas, and brought back fonts and SVG.

Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) came along in 1997. I remember going to a lecture by Danny Goodman at Mactivity in 1997, where I first saw CSS in action. It took years, but object-based design featuring CSS finally overtook old-fashioned, table-based design during the next decade.

Today we have Canvas and rounded-corners and yet we want more. There's a movement toward multiple columns of objects omitting floated DIVs amd other old notions. Recently a story about CSS 4.0 made the April Fool's rounds. As this is written, CSS 3.0 is still the rule of the day, but who knows what tomorrow will bring?

I have faithfully kept up with these changes in HTML and CSS and have advocated the usage of the HTML5 tag in order to force the Strict mode onto web pages, even if uisng older browsers. It just displays the pages more reliably.