1: Introduction to The Web Standards Curriculum/Table of Contents

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By chrismills Tuesday, 8. July 2008, 07:30:19

1: Introduction to The Web Standards Curriculum/Table of Contents

Here's where the education begins! In this article, Chris Mills lifts the lid on Opera's Web Standards Curriculum, a free course (licensed under creative commons) that aims to teach proper web standards–based web design and development from scratch. Read more to find out what the thinking behind the course is, who can benefit from it, what the table of contents is for the course, and how you can give feedback and get involved. We currently have the first 23 articles published, but more will follow in coming weeks and months.

( Read the article )

By Tamil Tuesday, 8. July 2008, 16:56:41

How the course is structured.

Why both bullets & numbers in Table of contents?

By chrismills Wednesday, 9. July 2008, 08:34:46

Originally posted by Tamil:

Why both bullets & numbers in Table of contents?

Whoops! I've fixed that now.

By timmi Wednesday, 9. July 2008, 12:50:42

*thumbsup*
Great course! Reading is like liquid, nice!
But, what when especially young readers (with not so perfekt english knowledge) want to read this. Is there a chance to find these articles in their native language?
And, when not, can we translate them?

By blonkm Wednesday, 9. July 2008, 12:53:19

You forgot one important reason NOT to use web standards: "we have a x million dollar system and we would need to rebuild it from the ground up". And that's a pretty compelling reason that kept companies like E-bay (who needs SEO, we're number one, pal!) to not upgrade for years while everyone was getting in line. Or take Google's standpoint 'data is king, all the rest is secondary'. A lot of people are quite surprised that a lot of Google pages are still table-cluttered tag soup, full of dirty looking hacks.

We actually did this at CaribMedia, we rewrote the whole presentation layer of our CMS ContentXL from the ground up, and the back end as well.

update: I just checked and ebay still hasn't done their upgrade. Maybe it's a lost cause. Consider what would be involved if they have HTML stored in a database (I hope not for their sake).

By A-David Saturday, 12. July 2008, 13:55:55

Chris,
Thanks for galvanising this effort.
It is important for us to keep working for this goal.
I was introduced to HTML / CSS at TAFE and through stupidity in backup I lost most of my notes and 'assignment'.As I have read through the course sofar, this is the material I lost and wanted to revise as I have to express some clear ideas on our website to our Board.
Regards, A-David.

By karaj Tuesday, 15. July 2008, 07:12:39

I have started to translate the articles into Hungarian, also under the same CC lincese. You can find them here: http://webszabvany.blog.hu/

By JokeDekker Tuesday, 15. July 2008, 07:20:57

Thank you for this nice curriculum. I think this will help a lot of developers to get a solid foundation.
I hope that the series will be completed soon. I am special interested in the articles on CSS.

By chrismills Wednesday, 16. July 2008, 11:01:39

Originally posted by A-David:

I was introduced to HTML / CSS at TAFE and through stupidity in backup I lost most of my notes and 'assignment'.As I have read through the course sofar, this is the material I lost and wanted to revise as I have to express some clear ideas on our website to our Board.Regards, A-David.

It is great to hear that the course is so useful to you, A-David!

Originally posted by karaj:

I have started to translate the articles into Hungarian, also under the same CC lincese. You can find them here: http://webszabvany.blog.hu/

Wow - this is fantastic. Thanks karaj! I will have to start putting together a translations resource so that people can see what's available, and we can avoid duplication of effort if multiple people want to work on the same languages.

By orinoco Thursday, 17. July 2008, 08:05:01

As explained above, it makes you code way more efficient, easier to write, and easier to maintain.

should be your code, or you code more efficiently.

/pedant

By childreninscotland Friday, 18. July 2008, 09:59:20

Chris,

This is a valuable programme, and it looks like I could use parts of it for in-house web authors at our educational charity.

How do you envisage updating the pages, and are you going to version control these documents? If I was compiling a training package, I'd like to have some fixed points for reference.

Thanks,
Alex

By variedthoughts Friday, 1. August 2008, 20:23:51

I really like the concept of the course.
Although most of the material is a refresher for me, I like the clarity and brevity of the articles, which makes them valuable as reference material. I also am looking forward to the CSS portion.

Is there plans in place to keep the content fresh?

In other words, is there a plan to review the content at least yearly to make sure information is not out of date?

Thanks,
Brian

By thomasschmidt Wednesday, 6. August 2008, 06:34:00

Great articles!
Despite I'm in the business for more than ten years now and my work is focused on project management, it is good source to update my knowledge on web standards. I'm looking forward to get the pronounced articles about css.
Thanks, Thomas

By chrismills Monday, 11. August 2008, 06:27:29

Originally posted by thomasschmidt:

Is there plans in place to keep the content fresh?In other words, is there a plan to review the content at least yearly to make sure information is not out of date?

Yes! There most certainly is.

Originally posted by thomasschmidt:

Great articles!

Thanks Thomas. The next batch of articles will be released before the end of this month - we're well on track for that.

By floyd1616 Friday, 22. August 2008, 19:51:55

Hi all,
I have started to translate the articles into Italian language, under the same CC lincese. The URL is:
http://www.jextrowebsite.com/index.php/categoria/web-standard/
Giuseppe

By patwink63 Wednesday, 3. September 2008, 02:22:45

Thanks to all the authors who are contributing to this project. I teach a high school webmastering course and am considering using this course as part of my curriculum. However, I have been reading it since the end of July and there have not been any new articles added. When will the next set of articles be available? Can you give me an idea of the basic topics of the remaining 28 or so articles that are not yet up on the web so I that I can put them into my semester lesson plans? Thanks.

By mohit115 Monday, 8. September 2008, 18:59:23

Nice effort, appreciate it, especially for starters like me, this is great!

By chrismills Tuesday, 9. September 2008, 09:33:52

Hello everyone, and thanks for the continued nice words about the curriculum. The 2nd part of the curriculum is all ready to go, and should be published at the end of this week, or early next week, depending on how quickly the proofreading gets finished.

The next part will cover accessibility and all of CSS.

The third part, which should appear before the end of the year, covers JavaScript basics. It is not intended to be a completely exhaustive JavaScript treatment - that would take up as much space as the rest of the curriculum put together. We will cover the basics, and then work on the rest of JavaScript, at a nice slow leisurely pace ;-)

By davidhund Tuesday, 16. September 2008, 19:30:50

Hi Chris (and others),

I am impressed and very happy this project has emerged. I think it will be a very valuable resource for people trying to either advocate or learn standards based web development. With others I would love to become involved in translating these courses. But I am also lazy and would hate to do unnecessary work :-) How can we help?

Another question would be how these course could be used (as part of) other courses. The license prohibits commercial use, but what (parts), if any, can be used in 'commercial' courses?

Thanks again and keep up the good work!

By chrismills Friday, 19. September 2008, 16:21:10

Originally posted by davidhund:

But I am also lazy and would hate to do unnecessary work :-) How can we help?

E-mail me at cmills [at] opera [dot] com and we'll discuss it more. I am trying to coordinate translations, and I don't think there is a Dutch one in the works yet. I have been talking to some of the Fronteers guys about it.

Originally posted by davidhund:

Another question would be how these course could be used (as part of) other courses. The license prohibits commercial use, but what (parts), if any, can be used in 'commercial' courses?

Any parts can be used if I give permission for them to be used ;-)

Whether I give permission or not depends on how the course organizer wishes to use the course. The whole point is for the material to be available to all for free. Perhaps if you ran a course using the course as the teaching material that was run at a reduced rate because of the material being free? Again, I would be willing to discuss it.

By swallach Friday, 3. October 2008, 21:43:29

Why is Text Styling with CSS denied access? Thank you, Sylvan Wallach

By chrismills Friday, 3. October 2008, 22:10:51

Originally posted by swallach:

Why is Text Styling with CSS denied access? Thank you, Sylvan Wallach

I have fixed it - you should be able to access it now. Apologies for this - it ended up back in its prepublished state. I really don't know how that happened ;-?

By dimumurray Saturday, 4. October 2008, 20:28:41

Hi Chris,
Thanks for a great resource. A question though, upon completion will the articles be made available for download as a single package or will it remain strictly on site?

By chrismills Tuesday, 7. October 2008, 16:06:05

Originally posted by dimumurray:

Thanks for a great resource. A question though, upon completion will the articles be made available for download as a single package or will it remain strictly on site?

Yes - we are currently working on the best way to create accessible PDFs of the course material - upon completion, the course will be made available to download as individual PDFs, and as a single PDF.

By danillonunes Friday, 24. October 2008, 02:33:36

Hi,

I started to make a translation to my Brazilian Portuguese language. The first article is here http://danillonunes.net/curriculo-dos-padroes-web/ (yes, i will fix the small style bugs later).

That's it.

Bye.

By UriVasiliev Friday, 28. November 2008, 22:15:05

Here
http://www.intuit.ru/department/internet/operawebst/
full translation to Russian (under Creative Commons).
We add the tests for all lectures.

By FataL Wednesday, 10. December 2008, 16:23:06

@UriVasiliev

By chrismills Thursday, 11. December 2008, 12:15:10

Originally posted by UriVasiliev:

Here
http://www.intuit.ru/department/internet/operawebst/
full translation to Russian (under Creative Commons).
We add the tests for all lectures.

OhMyGod - this is incredible - thannk you so much!

Get in touch - I'd love to talk to you about including English versions of some of your exercises/tests in the English version of the curriculum. In fact, I'll send you a message now ;-)

By theMadness Tuesday, 23. December 2008, 09:12:42

I will be traveling soon to go to my girlfriend's parent, and I'd love to read those articles when I'll be there (no internet connection will be available), is there a chance someone will provide a pdf package with all the articles and the examples (both the output and the source)?

It would be something nice to give to other people as a pseudo-book to be read before starting a course...

Scratch that, I just read above. Is there something available in the meanwhile? Maybe fan-made even.

By alex123us Thursday, 1. January 2009, 12:58:28

Originally posted by Tamil:

How the course is structured.

Why both bullets & numbers in Table of contents?

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1: Introduction to The Web Standards Curriculum/Table of Contents