In the beginning...

In terms of learning how to build a website, I knew I was going to have to start at the beginning. Off to school, W3 schools that is, and the web-building primer for the beginner. I have to admit I felt a bit out of my element. I had no clue about any of this. Would it be ‘beginner’ enough for me? Well, it started with a definition of the World Wide Web - I was cool so far. Moved on to a description pf HTML - again, good to go. Even though I wasn’t great at using the mark-up language at least I knew what it was. Big shout out to Bill Turkel and his Digital History class at Western! Hmm, then CSS - I was a little foggy in this area but had some rudimentary understanding. The next definition on the list was JavaScript. I’d heard of it and knew it had to do with programming which completely freaks me out. The description
used terms like “client-side scripting” and document.write(some crazy code). I shuddered and moved on. A little definition on XML which was understandable. Then some more stuff on server-side scripting and Structured Query Language. Quoi??

Okay, definitions out of the way, I wanted to get down to the nuts and bolts of it. I always understand better by ‘doing’ so I was ready for the challenge. My first task was to work through the HTML Primer - very exciting! I dutifully typed the suggested HTML into Notepad and this is what i got:

This is my first homepage. This text is bold

Pretty simple and it was easy to understand using such a limited amount of text.The explanation portion of the tutorial gave me a step by step run-down of what each of the tags did. Beautiful. The tutorial was very easy to understand and I was ready to tackle something a little more challenging!