Bad Q. Blogger made his Portland social debut yesterday at the Hardcore HTML
at Webtrends Corporate Headquarters
located on the 16th floor of the Pacific Center in Portland, Oregon
Nice view…
Until a couple / three years ago, I prided myself on my near-encyclopedic knowledge of the bleeding-edge of the HTML/XHTML (xhtml?) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) standards. The HTML standard, based on Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), while changing steadily, had not fundamentally changed in over a decade. Ever since the latter half of the 1990s, the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) had been trying to extricate the web from the perversions of the standard that came about as a result of the battle for Cyberspace between competing Microsoft and Netscape proprietary browser implementations.
During the last couple years, while I’ve been busy with other matters, web standards and practices have taken a drastic turn, with Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Drupal and, more recently, WordPress (which I have–for mostly arbitrary reasons— chosen as my CMS of choice); javascript libraries (such as jQuery), and most baffling of all (to me at least)– HTML5. I didn’t know where to start to get myself back on top of the Web Development game.
This meetup, Hardcore HTML (kudos to Eric Redmond for the presentation) delved into the history and semantic structure of the new HTML5 standard in a way that helped me understand the new standard, as well as the reasoning behing the changes.
All in all, one of the most… constructive evenings I’ve had in quite awhile.
Thanks Eric!
