3 weeks to learn XHTML/CSS

It takes a long while to get good at it though. While I believe I have mastered HTML, I am constantly lerning new stuff with CSS (around 9 months since I started learning)

It when you write valid, strict, minimalistic semantic markup without realising that you know you are great it it.

Don't cave into peer pressure: Say no to Dreamweaver.

 

Learn it? Yes.

Master it? Shit no.

I've been doing this for 7 years and I still find better ways of doing things (and people who say its easy and only takes a couple of days [and mention any software other than a text editor] are not the people you want to even talk to, they will teach you the wrong methods. Get the good habits down pat from the start)

 

its always about behaviour. the way we see and we code. .

 

The best way to learn programing is doing programming

Finish reading tutorials mentioned in above sites like w3schools.com , do some exercises, search some good tutorials , All in 5 days , Then take some good sites from the net. Try to do copy them from scratch . Don not copy the code, try to write your own. If you badly need take help viewing their code.

 

Eh, I'm still learning HTML let alone CSS.

You can easily learn the simple tags, even at the crapola w3schools site, and you can build things and it's like wow cool look what I made mom!

But actually, there's more to it. And you only really learn it after running into a problem here, an interesting dilemma there, and that you pretty much learn after someone says "make this particular thing" and you find unexpected things and results and questions while you do it.

++ to posts of blueparukia, nicangeli and rochow; read their posts again. If you need to learn it to learn it, do it the right way. Only get WYSIWYG software if you need to build a one-time personal website and care mostly about how it looks.

 

I learned xhtml in a few hours. CSS is just as easy

 

These are exactly the kind of people I'm talking about.

For everyones sake, I hope you're talking about "learning" (in which case, you're wrong anyway) as oppposed to actually being good.

Its not that I want to rip the hell out of people, its I want to rip up all this trash "tips and tricks" going around thats making rubbish sites, ruining the web. I'm not having a go at you, I'm having a go at your beliefs (whether it be "you can be a pro in 2 hours", "WYSIWGY is l33t", or "coding doesn't matter, its just about website design/seo/some other rubbish thing that doesn't even exist with HTML & CSS anyway")

EDIT:

Well, this previous post of yours says it all:

 

aoa all designer
please tell me about dreamwear and HTML.
THANK.

 

You'll pick up some basics in three weeks - then if you keep up your pace of learning in three years you're be able to go someway to mastering it.

It's best to start with HTML and get to grips with the basic tags.

 

Right. Spend 10 minutes in WYSIWYG to make the site, THEN spend another 10 minutes to half hour on cleaning it to something HALF WAY usable that I am almost willing to bet will never validate with a strict doctype, because of all the crap like <font>, <center> and <u>.

Its crap. Now you know everything about it

 

Well... I learned it in two days plus a decent foundation of PHP so...

 

^static: we're saying there's learning the basics and then there's knowing it.

Like, learning phrases of a new language with a phrase book, and then being fluent. Two different things. Although I'm sure there are exceptional individuals out there who can indeed master HTML in a few days-- these would be the folks who can fluently speak a half-dozen languages and pick up new ones easily. That's not 99% of the rest of us though : )

 

Stomme, if my post implied even a bit of arrogance, I deeply apologize as it certainly wasn't my intentions. Let me further elaborate on my above post. Now that I see it, it is purely an unhelpful post.

3 weeks is a plenty of time to learn both languages and be to some degree, fluent at it. I think it really depends on the approach you take. If you want to pick up the language, memorize your tags and then try them out and see the results. Then, look at other's examples that are freely avaliable and see how the "experts" did it. Then, try to imitate (note, not copy) and change a few things here and there, and see the results. Make one change, refresh, see what happens. This is the approach that I took when I was serious about learning it. As Stomme mentioned, I'm part of the 99% that can't pick up a language from scratch. The couple of days probably worked out because I saw bits of the codes here and there over a few months without any intentions on learning. However, through that experience and a determination to really pick it up to work your magic with the language, three weeks is enough, assuming that you really put your effort into it.

Don't expect the knowledge to just remain in your head. It's a combination of trial and error along with effort.

 

It's possible but I don't see it happening really. Css/xhtml is something you learn over the years of doing it. I've been doing it for a while now and I still run into things that I have to look up. So I think you will be able to get a good foundation but you wont be able to learn over 50% of it I say.

 

Oh, not at all-- whenever I find myself saying "one can't do x" then I feel I should mention those strange people who really are not the 99% of us.

But them aside, here are some problems:

Often times you can make changes and not see a difference. The code may have become invalid or even be throwing an error, but unfortunately browsers often cover for you when you do this. Or, some browsers will and others won't. Or, you made a change and it ended up being another way of doing the same thing, which is great except you still don't know what advantage there may be to doing one way as opposed to another. Or, you see a difference, but what you might see as a direct cause ends up being a cascade instead-- and then there's always "correlation != causation" going on : )

Then, finding expert code isn't easy. You'd think you'd just go to some big website, like Yahoo-- they are a big rich company, and web-based, so their code must be great, right? It's a cesspool, with good bits floating around with the turds.

Even when you see a technique, and you learn it by copying, often you still don't know which parts where important and which parts where simply that designer's personal liking. And you find this by doing, and Doing simply takes a lot of time.

You said three weeks is plenty of time... well, it's a lot more than the 2 days I was referencing:

You can of course learn more in three weeks than 2 days... but I'll say it again, I'm a bit of a moron but I'm going on about a year now and still don't have it down pat (though I'm pretty comfortable with it, but hell, I'm still learning both English and Dutch words too...).

Yeah, it's very possible the OP can get a very large amount of HTML down in three weeks. I don't know what that deadline means, if it's before building a site for a customer or something, or taking a test at school... I wouldn't do the former on only three weeks, nooo...

Absolutely-- maybe even the majority. You can learn something by reading about it, and then when you actually build it, stuff comes up you didn't even know about, and then you spend like hours bug-hunting... which is often where the learning happens.

 

Wow I'd really like to see the websites of those who say they learn this or that in days or weeks!

i've been learning html and css for months and while I can make decent sites, Im still a while from transferring whats in my imagination to a website

its the same with content with a website, sure you can make a website about Tahiti in 4 days, but will it stand out from the rest? No way

Its the same with website development, you need to think in terms of months and years to make a website you can be proud about, rather then some boring edited template

 

I've been doing HTML for about 7 or 8 years now (started when I was 11 or 12) 100% as a hobby, a few years ago I started using CSS properly and a few months ago I started validating my pages and know learnt most of XHTML. I've never actually sat down and studied it, however. My learning is all from practice, find what works and what doesn't, try it in other browsers and micro$oft's screenviewer (Internet Explorer) then look for a solution to fix the problem without compromise on design. If you actually studied it you could probably learn it properly in a month, I highly doubt anyone - even though it's easy - could learn it in less than a day or any time less than at least a few weeks. You will still need to put it into practise for maby a year though be for you actually have "learnt" it.

I hate WYSIWYG editors with a passion, they've been filling the internet with noob sites for years, now these days there's nooblogs that's saturating it worse. Under no circumstances do I use this stuff(or any CMS) unless I made my own for internal use.

 

Thank god, somebody with a shred of intelligence. I hate all of the wordpress and joomla (etc) piles of crap.

 

All of them Nick? I happen to have a WordPress Theme undergoing beta testing you just might actually like (aside from the crap that WordPress spews forth in its menus and widgets, but that's beside the point).

 

Plenty of time!