HTML and Me
So about HTML...I first heard of the Internet with all those little three and a half inch floppy disks that America Online mailed everyone back in 1994. I didn't really hear about the Internet again until 1996, before I moved to Saudi Arabia. Someone had asked me if I had access to the Internet. Then in 1997, my dad showed me how to dial up to the Internet in Saudi Arabia through our company's server, thus beginning my exploration of the World Wide Web...
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In the beginning, I didn't really know what the Web was for, so I only used it for news and game cheat codes. My dad signed me up for a Yahoo e-mail address, which initially did not see regular use. Then in the summer of 1998, I visited my friend Brianna. She gave me her new e-mail address, which led to a gradual increase in e-mailing when I returned to Dhahran to the point of my e-mailing everyday. And she also introduced me to and got me started with GeoCities and Tripod and even typed some HTML code at her computer for me to see, such as the <p> tags. A couple months afterwards in November, I created a GeoCities account under the name dinosore, which became my online alias for the next three years. I began using PageBuilder, a fancy online program that created webpages by dragging objects into place, but it was so frustratingly sluggish that I only created a swirly black index page with two dancing bears and a few dead links. I still had a strong interest in the game SimCity, which was what got me started with my frequent visits to message boards. I remember seeing people posting messages in bold, in italics, in color, and I asked how they did that. They told me it was HTML, and a couple people told me what the <font> tags were. I had begun to learn how to use HTML.
I moved from using PageBuilder to Basic HTML Editor and later to Advanced HTML Editor. There was still much to learn, and I still didn't know completely what HTML was all about. I began to view the source code of any webpage I visited whenever I saw a feature of interest. For example, if I saw a blue table with a green header that I liked, I'd view the code of that webpage and figure out how it all worked. It was time consuming, but it was fun, and it unwittingly became a hobby of mine. By April 1999, I understood pretty much all of the basic HTML and created a brand new homepage incorporating my new cumulated knowledge. Over the years, I continued grabbing other websites' codes and breaking them apart for analysis, learning new HTML every week. And when I figured out that I could create HTML files using Notepad, I was able to create and view my webpages offline and upload them when I was done, which sped up the creation process. I went through many site renovations as I explored more complex arts of HTML like the many different layouts of tables, the split arrangements of frames, and the use of links with coordinates in a picture with image maps. In 2001, I began embracing CSS, and restyled nearly all my pages with CSS, and then again when I updated most of my pages to full XHTML standards and table-less layouts in 2004. Javascript became more readable after my first programming class in C++ in 2003, but I still don't write my own scripts. Someday.
The web medium is an easy and powerful enough to control the aspects of presentation of your content, down to every last pixel of image and text, with a vast color palette at your disposal. I hope these web coding resources will help you along the way if you're working to expand your HTML play. Trust me, it's fun.
