HTML IS NOT FUNNY

http://wiresmash.com/funny/collection-of-very-funny-html-jokes/

Q: Why was the XHTML bird an invalid?
A: Because it wasn't nested properly.
(courtesy of  www.htmldog.com)

HTML is not funny.  There is absolutely nothing funny about it.  This is serious.

The past week has been a belly flop off the high dive into the pool of HTML-and it was not pretty.  Of course HTML is extremely important.  Without it there would be no cool stuff on the internet to look at.  In fact, this conversation with all my loyal followers could not take place without this highly prized language.  HTML comprehension is pertinent to an aspiring internet wise guy such as myself, but I beg to ask the question "Why is this not fun?"


Learning new tricks can often seem daunting for there is always a learning curve to every new venture one attempts.  It has been my experience to visualize a new goal or aspiration and work towards it, typically ramming my head into the wall of the problem until I make a break through.  I'm pretty good at doing this.  Just six months ago I picked up the clarinet for the first time and in a month I'm playing lead clarinet in a local Dallas noise band.  This summer a friend challenged me to learn to ride a unicycle and in three weeks I was up on one wheel- two weeks later I was able to ride the unicycle while playing the clarinet!  I got a lot of laughs out of that one.  Obviously, I have fun teaching myself new tricks.

All of this said, I must admit that I am not having fun learning HTML.  It is so foreign to my style of doing things.  Of course I am not writing massive thousand lined data mining code, but even this simplistic blog HTML is consecutively causing me mild migraines.

I set out upon the seas of Google to find something that could ease my upward climb towards HTML proficiency.  There is a lot of information out there- unfortunately non of it was what I would consider a party.

http://htmldog.com/

HTML Dog is probably the coolest site that I found that covers HTML.  The majority of the site is written by Patrick Griffiths.  As stated on the sites about us page, "HTML Dog has been dishing out healthy code treats since 2003, and currently serves up around 1,500,000 page views a month. The idea is to take the somewhat convoluted official specs for XHTML and CSS and present them in a much more readable fashion."  I would have to agree with this statement.  The site offers tutorials that cover HTML and CSS for beginners to the advanced.  Granted there are only so many ways that the subject can be presented, but HTML Dog seems to tackle it in a fresh manner- bookmark this site.

Being the visual video head that I am, I have to include this video by  jimmyrcom into my HTML arsenal.  

This forty minute video is very basic and easy to follow.  It gives a human touch to this very robotic beep beep language of HTML.  Seeing that this video has over nine hundred thousand views on YouTube offers me solace in the fact that I am not alone in my lack of knowledge on this topic.


There is possibly an infinite number of online resources on the ins and outs of HTML.  The more I research the more I discover the same information presented in different ways.  I am starting to feel a bit more confident here.  Even within the editing of this blog post I have become subtly more proficient at fixing the HTML code as I dissect and fine tune the post for public viewing.  within my last blog post I had difficulties with spacing and layout.  I knew I was messing up the HTML somewhere but did not understand how to fix it.  Having the same issues within this post I "manned up" and dove into the HTML to identify the issue and solve it.  I am far from being the HTML whiz kid that I wished I was, but I can see some light at the end of this tunnel.  I'm still ramming my head up against the problem but I am beginning to notice cracks within the mortar of this wall.