Online tutorials are pretty bad, aren't they? I've started a blog about it

[callumd]

Online tutorials are pretty bad, aren't they? I've started a blog about it:

http://easytutes.blogspot.com/

I hope to use this blog to showcase only the best online web development tutorials. Along the way, I'd like to identify what makes for a good tutorial - I've got some pretty strong ideas on that. I think the quality of the current online tutorials are so bad, we should put together a World Wide Web Tutorial Consortium, and release some standards that every future tutorial should be written in. (I'm joking there). I do however hope to form some simple rules that all online tutorials should abide by. The rules are a work in progress, and I hope to get some community feedback on them.

I have also started writing my first ever tutorial - on DOCTYPEs. I can find no decent online tutorial about DOCTYPEs, but there's loads of bad ones, so I thought it would be a good first attempt.

Please let me know what you think.

[TJ111]

I agree on the fact that several tutorials are horrible. At the same time, there are alot of excellent ones out there too. I hate thinking "how the hell did I do that before", google tutorials on it, and get pages "Copy this code into x file, then this into y file, and everything works". I don't care if it works, I want to see how to do it so I can incorporate it myself. On the note of DOCTYPES, please don't post about the awesomeness of XHTML, it's really not the correct doctype to use 99% of the time.

Now to the site review, I like the concept. I think you need better navigation features though, like tag each article with HTML/CSS, etc, then have links to each type on the side. Also maybe just put the "Audience" and a snippet of the tutorial on the front page, and make the rest viewable when the user clicks through to the article.

[callumd]

Thanks for the reply, TJ111.

I certainly agree that sometimes when we're googling for info, we're just looking to refresh our memory about how we used to perform a certain task.

I guess the tutorials I am referring to are the "starting from scratch" varieties. The tutorials that introduce brand new concepts so that the reader can understand what it is, how it works, why it's important, etc. Perhaps I can make this a bit clearer somehow.

[Jeff Mott]

I do however hope to form some simple rules that all online tutorials should abide by.

Rule number 1: Know what you're talking about.


That being said, callumd, I'm not sure you know what you're talking about in your DOCTYPE tutorial (which is supposed to be your example of a good tutorial)...

"These web browsers made up their own rules when interpreting HTML code. For example, the <h1> tag would cause a heading to look slightly different in one browser than it did in another.... And so, a group of people got together and decided to form some standard rules for how web browsers should interpret HTML. For example, they would decide precisely how text between some <h1></h1> tags should look in a browser (its color, size, shape, font, etc)."

No version of the HTML spec has ever defined how any element must appear on screen. At best you'll find descriptions of typical renderings.

"In 1999, the W3C released these rules to the public. These rules became known as the 'web standards'."

A lot happened before 1999. The first HTML draft was release in 1993, HTML 2.0 in 1995, HTML 3.2 in 1997, and only then was HTML 4.01 released in 1999.

"After the standards were released, some problems became apparent.... They then released a 2nd version of their “web standards”.... Some pages existed that were written in accordance with the old standards, while newer pages were being written following the new standards.... Then someone made a clever suggestion: Why don’t we get web designers to put a special bit of text at the top of their HTML code, that will let the browser know which version of the standards the page was built in?"

You imply that DOCTYPEs are something new that just sprung up sometime after 1999, but DOCTYPEs have always been a required part of HTML.



Your five rules are a good idea, but if you don't have you facts straight, then all you'll accomplish with your clear writing is to promote misinformation.

[callumd]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the feedback there.

I did forget to mention that I wasn't completely sure of all of the "facts" that I had mentioned in my DOCTYPE article. Having gone through as many tutorials about them as I can find, some things still aren't clear to me. I've pulled the article offline until I can clear these things up.

Perhaps you can help me. I know that HTML was around well before 1999.. but my understanding is that the W3C didn't release their first set of web standards until 1999? Since then, they have released updated versions of these standards, right?

Do you have a clear understanding of how HTML version upgrades worked prior to this? I thought it was driven by individual web browsers, who at times, even made up their own tags?

"No version of the HTML spec has ever defined how any element must appear on screen. At best you'll find descriptions of typical renderings"

Really? That's an enormous surprise to me if it's true. How do the W3C ever expect to solve the problems of cross browser support if they're just giving general guidelines for how things should appear on screen?

Thanks again.

[Jeff Mott]

I know that HTML was around well before 1999.. but my understanding is that the W3C didn't release their first set of web standards until 1999? Since then, they have released updated versions of these standards, right?1999 is when they released HTML 4.01, which (if you can't tell from the version number) wasn't their first release. Since then, they've released XHTML, which has had a mixed adoption process. Wikipedia will give you a decent enough history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#History_of_HTML.

How do the W3C ever expect to solve the problems of cross browser support if they're just giving general guidelines for how things should appear on screen?Because HTML isn't supposed to describe visual appearance. HTML describes data, and CSS describes how data should appear (or otherwise render). So, for instance, HTML says "this text is a heading," and CSS says "headings should be large and bold."

Most browsers include default renderings for certain HTML elements, but they're not required to do so.

Do you have a clear understanding of how HTML version upgrades worked prior to this? I thought it was driven by individual web browsers, who at times, even made up their own tags?Individual browsers did, in fact, make up their own tags. The W3C and HTML spec still existed, but no one considered it a priority to follow them. Thus came the browser wars, which is sort of when the Web hit rock bottom, and everyone finally realized that every browser having their own private markup language wasn't going to work.

[callumd]

Thanks Jeff.

One final question if I may.

It still isn't clear to me how the W3C hope to achieve full cross browser support if they aren't specifying how web browsers should display elements on a screen. Or is this not their aim?

[Jeff Mott]

They are specifying how browsers should display elements, but they're doing so in the CSS spec, not the HTML spec.

[callumd]

Right, I gotchya.

Thanks.

I've got some major re-working to do.