I am slightly concerned as to the usefulness of teaching HTML in this manner. HTML standards are created by the WWWC, World Wide Web Consortium. The most recent HTML standard is HTML 4.01, this, as with most previous ones, requires a Document Type Definition - this tells the computer reading it what language it is written in - much like a file extension. The HTML examples given in the tutorials make no reference to this, a key problem. Next, the tags in the tutorials are written in uppercase, this is not compliant with the most recent version of HTML.

I don't want to cause trouble, but I'm sceptical as to the use of "half-teaching" this, I have nothing against learning, but I dislike simplification to the extent that things are wrong.

I may be missing something, and I hope I am as I find the MM mag a great read and everyone on the forums are great people.

Chris

EDIT: on rereading, I am glad to see the emphasis on the proper closing of tags and the use of stylesheets. More worried by the inclusion of the font tag, I believe this was removed from the standard in HTML version 3!

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I did mention this in the web hosting forum (in reply to a thread). In terms of simple HTML then the tutorials are fine. But for anyone wanting to start coding seriously then they arn't so useful. You are correct the font tag was depreciated a while ago. Also it is perfectly valid to have uppercase tags in html 4.0.1. But not Xhtml1,0 (except Xhtml 1.0 transitional) which is the current html standard. The DTD is useful but not essential to the browser, it will display pages wothout it. However, pages with a DTD will be easier to parse as the browser knows what too expect.

That said most modern browsers will still dispaly the page fine! The font tag 9for example) despite technically no longer being needed will still work.

The trouble is that I think that to teach html properly it would have taken twice as long as it did!

Very soon Xhtml 1.0 will be supersceded by Xhtml 2.0. This new version will fix some of the glaring stupidity in old Html!!! LOL For example the  6 heading tags (there will just be one).
XHtml was created to strip Html back to it's XML roots, which V1.0 didnt do too well (as they had to include a transitional phase to the process to ensure compatibilty) hopefully V2.0 will do it better! (PS Xforms is going to be released in XHTML2.0 as well - which is quite exciting)

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/  -- OFFICIAL PAGE
News report on Xhtml 2.0


I also wrote (quite extensively) about this on my blog not very long ago - see here

On another note: Are there any plans to do a PHP diploma? or even just an article. seeing as PHP seems to IMHO be the way forward in web coding it might be nice!


Cheers,
Tom