RE: Software recommendation for beginners
by "Christian Lavoie" <clavoie(at)enter-net.com>
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Date: |
Sat, 4 Jul 1998 12:04:24 -0400 |
To: |
<hwg-software(at)hwg.org> |
In-Reply-To: |
wilmington |
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todo: View
Thread,
Original
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Being a high school student (well, I'm off to college next year) and having
learn HTML "recently" (a year and a half) I think my opinion can be of some
interest.
I've learned it in the "steal method". I mean I've looked through sources,
compared to the standart from the W3C and built my knowledge on that. I
produce full-validating code (Although it wasn't that way at first) and
hand-code it all except when talking about lots of table-layouts. I'm using
the Homesite/Dreamweaver pair and I'm pretty happy with it. Although it's
real that some guys will use Dreamweaver only, to take shortcuts and won't
learn HTML the right way, I say it's a good thing to offer it to student.
Last year, here in our school, the teacher decided to offer Graphics
classes, and so was proud to show us the newly bought Paint Shop Pro 3.x
(can't remember the exact minor version). I was laughing. They did had the
budget to upgrade all their computers to Adobe Photoshop 4 but decided not
to because some students would use it's advanced features wrongly. The class
was a real mess since the features PSP3 was offering were just not enough to
satisfy the ever-asking-for-more students who had finished the scheduled
courses a few months before they should have.
The fact is if students use a WYSIWYG to cut in time and don't learn "clean"
hand-coded HTML, they are the losers, and it should show off in their notes.
Not on the rest of the class options. Give them the best tools available,
and punish those who are, after all, not interested enough to go the right
way. IMHO, what's the difference between this and the use of computer
spelling and grammar correction services like Word have? The students who
use these services lose, at the end, their own skills, much like the
calculator example. It's a question of personnal development, and
responsablility. Those who are interested enough in HTML and web will learn
it the right way, and will enjoy Dreamweaver high-end DHTML features. And,
IMHO again, a year is plain enough to gather (at 1/9th of the classes
devoted to HTML and web stuff) all the skills required. I did in three
months on my own.
Christian Lavoie
> Suzanne Ankerbrand wrote:
>
> > Thanks for all the replys on my original post. Now that I've read all
> > these posts I have to agree on one point, how do you learn html without
> > writing it? These will be high school students as well as some middle
> > school and younger so learning it will be a valuable skill. Starting out
> > with a WYSIWIG editor would be like using a calculator before learning
> > your mulplication tables ... if you don't learn them early on,
> chances are
> > you won't know them later either. -Suzanne
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