I did a CIW “website design manager” course a few years back that dipped its toe slightly into actual design and scripting. Turned out to be a waste of time and now I want to get properly into all aspects of building sites.
The question is, what technologies do I need to look at. I see things called jQuery, but since I only touched on javascript I dont yet know what it is. Im presuming, in this order:
HTML v?
CSS v?
JavaScript.
But what else?
Is validation still important?
Are Doctype declarations still used?
I did a CIW course a few years ago, your right it was a waste of time…
You will want to learn how to write semantic markup for html and CSS and I would look at javascript before looking at javascript libraries. It will pay off in the long run.
I would recommend the following sites which are great at getting you started and should give you enough information to start coding up a static website.
Validation is still very important as is using the correct doctype(strict).
That should be more than enough to sink your teeth into for now. If you get any other questions everyone over here seems to be more than helpful in helping you sort your problems out.
[list=1][]HTML 4.01 (Strict) – still going strong. HTML5 is on its way, but it’s too early to care about for anything but the curiosity value.
[]CSS 2.1 – support is good now, but IE6 and IE7 are still used by many. Parts of CSS3 has decent support as well and can be used – but not relied upon.
[*]JavaScript isn’t necessary for all sites, but it’s quite common. Also learn the DOM (Document Object Model), at least Level 2. Once you know them fairly well, you can look at libraries like jQuery to make things more efficient. But learn the basics first![/list]
And if you want to develop dynamic sites or web applications,
[list][]SQL
[]A server-side scripting language like PHP, Ruby or Python.
[*]A server-side programming language/framework like Java/J2EE or C#.NET[/list]
Yes, it’s a good way to check on the quality of your work. Just like you should run a spellchecker on the copy you’ve written.
Yes. They’re also used now for guessing whether a web document should be rendered in ‘standards mode’ or in some quaint ‘quirks mode’ to be compatible with ancient tag soup. The recommended doctype declaration at the moment is,
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
Parts of CSS3 has decent support as well and can be used – but not relied upon.