Sunday 30 January 2005

outdated HTML guides

FILLED WITH OUTDATED guides for HTML and CSS, is the web-at-large more hazardous than helpful to the masses trying to learn how to design web pages?

This morning a regular reader wrote in with two HTML tutorial sites he found that he referred to as “evil.” One is the neopets HTML guide, and the other is the infamous Joe Burns HTML Goodies site. While I’m not sure they’re evil in the truest sense of the word, they certainly are terribly outdated. Yet, there they are, available for folks who might not know better to learn how to do everything old-skool.

That might work for grandpa if he just wants to post some photos of his worldwide adventures for the grandkids at home, but for anyone looking to learn professional, contemporary web design techniques, these sites are definitely bad news. Heck, I can add at least a third of my own books to that pile. We live, we learn, right?

But books, at least, get pulled off the shelf after a while (even if they do appear on eBay later – that’s not something I have any control over). Web sites, however, tend to stay up a lot longer.

There are some good guides out there, one of my faves is Dave Shea’s collected “Standards Resources for Beginners.” Maybe another way to be helpful is to find the outdated guides and weed those out into a “which sites to avoid” list.

So let’s get started!

Hat tip: Jason

Filed under:   standards, web design and development
Posted by:   Molly | 07:53 | Comments (27)

27 Responses to “outdated HTML guides”

1. patrick h. lauke says:

   Sunday 30 January 2005 at 14:15

   remember discussing this with somebody before (though at the moment it really escapes who, or where, or why), but yes, these old sites do more harm than good. one problem (in this context) with the web is obviously that there’s no expiry date on things. a physical book would stop being in circulation after a while, not being sold or prominently displayed in the relevant section of a library…yet with the web (and thanks to oodles of people linking to those old, venerable, yet outdated resources) a search for anything related to “dummy guide to HTML” still brings up those relics in top rankings.
   the solution, of course, is to start dishing out more and more good resources, get them highly ranked, squashing the outdated stuff. this is now thankfully happening with physical items (heck, even our small bookshop on campus now has a few copies of zeldman and meyer on the shelf, phasing out those “definitive guide to HTML 3.0″ tomes that used to line that section)…
2. patrick h. lauke says:

   Sunday 30 January 2005 at 14:16

   ah…no sooner did i post the above, that i remembered where this kind of thing was mentioned (and quite beautifully to boot): derek featherstone’s “growing up with web standards”
3. Tom says:

   Sunday 30 January 2005 at 16:14

   Yea totally, I have this guy at work who allways talks about DHTML and these weird Microsoft stuff called TDC. It’s really horrid.

   But of course, for him its not broke so why try and fix it?
4. Oliver says:

   Monday 31 January 2005 at 01:53

   patrick h. lauke wrote:

   …yet with the web (and thanks to oodles of people linking to those old, venerable, yet outdated resources) a search for anything related to “dummy guide to HTML” still brings up those relics in top rankings. …

   It might be a good idea to deactivate the links (and maybe just display the URI without linking to it). As long as you have those links active, you are one of those linking to “dummy guides” of the past.

   Those who are not so savvy won’t know how to go to those sites that are not actively linked or just don’t bother, those who are know how to copy-paste the address.

   Just a thought.
5. Lachlan Hunt says:

   Monday 31 January 2005 at 03:56

   Maybe it’s time to put a Google Bomb to some good use for a change. If all good (web related) bloggers linked to some of the good tutorials using common search terms, such as: Beginner’s HTML Tutorial, dummy’s guide to web design, etc. Of course it would be much more effective if the terms and sites were thought about a little more and agreed upon, though it would certainly work to reduce the rankings for the bad HTML tutorials.
6. Fergus Wilde says:

   Monday 31 January 2005 at 04:12

   I’m about to redo our site, which is now in xhtml 1.0 transitional with css, and I’m keen to ‘do the right thing’ – but what *is* the right thing? What’s the most useful, correct, forward looking standard I can employ that won’t leave our largely non-tech user base stranded? Even most of the open source tools still make it a deal easier to use html 4.x than xhtml 1.1, into which I’m looking. Advice please … sorry if this is the wrong place.
7. Promotional Products Blog says:

   Monday 31 January 2005 at 09:44

   Picking a Blogging Platform
8. Virtuelvis says:

   Monday 31 January 2005 at 09:45

   Standards are (nearly) irrelevant.
   Which standard should you conform to? In response to a question by Fergus Wilde, asking which markup standard he conforms to
9. Molly says:

   Monday 31 January 2005 at 10:31

   Fergus,

   It really depends upon your needs. Valid HTML 4.0 or XHTML 1.0 written semantically and combined with CSS for presentation is about as good as it gets. XHTML 1.1 is best only for very unique situations, such as when you want your documents parsed as XML.

   Definitely check out the resources in this discussion at Dave Shea’s: http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/08/25/standards_re/index.php
10. Jeremy Smith's blog says:

    Monday 31 January 2005 at 10:54

    Outdated HTML Guides
    From outdated HTML guides FILLED WITH OUTDATED guides for HTML and CSS, is the web-at-large more hazardous than helpful to…
11. patrick h. lauke says:

    Monday 31 January 2005 at 18:55

    oliver, unfortunately those people with active links to outdated guides are usually also people who haven’t caught on with *why* these guides are outdated…hence, they won’t deactivate their links…
12. Jim Bennett says:

    Monday 31 January 2005 at 21:14

    This morning a regular reader wrote in with two HTML tutorial sites he found that he referred to as “evil.”

    There are a lot of things in this world that would qualify as evil but a web site with outdated/incorrect information about HTML wouldn’t be on most people’s list.

    I see these types of comments on the various email lists and newsgroups that deal with CSS and web development in general and while it used to amuse me it now just annoys me.

    Hopefully this individual will have more to be concerned with once June rolls around and it’s off to the local community college to continue and hopefully complete their educational goals.

    Or not………….
13. Dustin Diaz says:

    Tuesday 1 February 2005 at 00:00

    Well, did anyone know Nielsen’s book still sits on the shelf (and sells)? Yea, I saw 5 copies at barnes and noble’s just two days ago. He’s not one for using web standards.

    Besides that, this is one main reason why I still write tutorials about basic html.

    also, here’s another for the list:
    http://www.htmlbasix.com/
14. Jules says:

    Tuesday 1 February 2005 at 14:16

    Ok, this is going to come off very self-congratulating but here goes anyway.

    I first learned HTML using Alan Levine’s HTML tutorial. What I liked about the tutorial was that it walked you through the various steps of creating a web site from nothing to a small site about volcanoes. Unlike other so-called tutorials, the basic philosophy (as I see it) was “real world, not Hello World!” which means to me that features are taught in the context of actual use. When I set about writing my books, I wanted to use this principal of “real world, not hello world”. As a standards advocate, I also wanted to teach how to create semantic HTML. According to Cheryl Colan’s comments, it appears that my goals have been achieved.

    What my comment here is trying to say is that although there are many bad tutorials out there, there are more and more books being written that teach HTML properly. What may be the next challenge — and one I have been thinking about for the last few months — is to create online tutorials that teach HTML the way HTML should be taught these days. Also, these tutorials should not be piece-meal tutorials but complete projects, i.e., real world, not hello world.
15. Dustin Diaz says:

    Tuesday 1 February 2005 at 14:42

    I guess the lesson learned is that there still not enough ’standards html tutorials’

    most of the tuts that i’ve found within this last year have been for folks that already know html (the bad way) and having to ‘unlearn’ ourselves.
16. Jason says:

    Tuesday 1 February 2005 at 20:59

    I came upon those links I sent Molly after writing a mini-HTML guide for a discussion board I belong to. I noticed many of the members were writing pages that didn’t include DOCTYPES, so I thought I would write a short guide.

    Some members starting posting links to HTML guides they use/used, and I was shocked to see such outdated things as center and font tags. I couldn’t believe such guides still existed.

    I, of course, pointed them to the right place (see author) *hint* *hint* *nudge* *nudge*. Hopefully they will follow through and learn a little about standards and CSS. (Some were actually arguing that FireFox interpret CSS… the horror!)
17. Jason says:

    Tuesday 1 February 2005 at 21:01

    wow… we need an edit function

    That should read “started posting” and “FireFox couldn’t interpret”
18. Alex says:

    Tuesday 1 February 2005 at 21:03

    Whoo! I started out with the Neopets HTML guide!
19. Jason says:

    Wednesday 2 February 2005 at 10:59

    Here’s a shocker: The tutorial on the W3C site by Dave Raggett makes no mention of DOCTYPEs or even adding the HTML element before you start your document. Dave Raggett’s Introduction to HTML.
20. holly says:

    Thursday 3 February 2005 at 04:33

    Dave Raggett’s Introduction to HTML (and associated tutorials), HTML Goodies, JZ’s Ask Doctor Web (1995-1998, now removed), and a few notable others, CSS Pointers (experiments, resources, articles), Index Dot CSS, HTML (Brian Wilson great guide and reference), RichInStyle (only one I knew that had advanced CSS2 info on the web back when), were often visited sites ~ 1998 and earlier. Also Sizzlin Jalfrezi. I may still return to some of the older sites to look for a few info gems (e.g. bloobery.com) or related older articles (Tod Fahrner, etc.). There did not seem to be as many timely books. I believe it was easier to learn online by seeing the working examples and being able to view the source(markup and styles) on the document. (How many of us learned.)

    Big Question
    If one was creating a very basic hypertext markup tutorial, directed at school age learners, would it be better to present HTML or give them XHTML? If HTML I think I would personally opt for the HTML strict, well-formatted variety, sans deprecated items.
21. Hayden Craddolph says:

    Friday 4 February 2005 at 13:26

    Thanks for your most recent support with my site.
22. Oscar Sierra says:

    Friday 11 February 2005 at 18:08

    I’m actually planning to completely revamp my website and was feeling hopeless with so much rubish out there… until I bought a copy of your awesome book Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer’s Edge. Great work! Keep it up!
23. ceren moray says:

    Sunday 27 January 2008 at 05:37

    nice …
    than you
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25. kavak yelleri says:

    Friday 4 April 2008 at 23:49

    Those who are not so savvy won’t know how to go to those sites that are not actively linked or just don’t bother, those who are know how to copy-paste the address.
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