4 minute read

I finished W3Schools’ HTML tutorial.

My background in HTML

I have professional and personal experience with HTML.

As a data engineer for my previous company, I used PHP and HTML templates to display SQL query results to stakeholders. The stakeholders viewed these results on a webpage in our company’s network.

I, however, didn’t write these HTML templates by hand. Instead, I wrote PHP code to dynamically generate HTML code. Typically, the scripts generated an HTML table within a larger HTML document. These scripts iterated over the SQL query results to find the values that belong in each of the table’s cells. Stakeholders used this generated table to review the SQL query’s results.

We used GitLabs to publish these scripts. When I changed a script, I submitted a pull request to my team’s GitLabs repository. After a senior engineer approved the changes, I merged them into the main branch. This process let us track changes to our scripts and their HTML output.

Outside of work, I made a website using PHP and my own HTML templates. I hosted it on Bluehost, a WordPress platform that supports custom web applications. I wrote blog posts in HTML and saved them to a MySQL server. A PHP script queried the server with parameters from a page’s URL to get a specific post’s contents. To add a blog post to my site, I inserted it as HTML text into a table in the MySQL server. Then, the PHP scripts automatically created a page for it.

This website taught me how to think of my content as components, rather than as individual documents. For common components, like the <html> tag and the <head> and <footer> blocks, I wrote them once and inserted them into other documents with PHP scripts. This let me update these components across my website from a single file. This strategy meant I could make new pages and upkeep old ones easily.

Currently, I work with Markdown both at work and at home. I still, however, use HTML in situations where Markdown isn’t flexible enough for my needs. My previous experience with HTML helps me understand when and how to use it in the larger context of my work.

W3schools’ HTML tutorial review

The W3schools’ HTML tutorial was easy to follow, but wasn’t effective overall.

The tutorial had a logical flow from one lesson to another. It starts with basic concepts, such as editors, HTML basics, and the most common HTML elements. It progresses to more complex topics, like CSS styling, compound HTML elements, and JavaScript automation. Each lesson built on the concepts from the last.

Still, the tutorial had structural problems. One problem was that the language from one lesson to another wasn’t consistent. Some lessons, like HTML Basic Examples and HTML Input form* Attributes, start with This chapter…. Others omit this convention and offer a brief definition of a concept instead. Some lessons, like HTML Links Hyperlinks and HTML Image Maps, refer to JavaScript as a language. Others refer to it as an object, like HTML head Elements and HTML FilePaths. The inconsistencies distract from learning the material.

Another problem was the quizzes at the end of each lesson. The quizzes were very short. Many were only three or four questions. They were often too easy and did not effectively challenge the learner.

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