So Long, NCSA Primer
by Scott Hardie on August 28, 2006
Someone asked me for help learning HTML today. I turned to my trusted traditional source, the good old primer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, but alas, it has finally been removed after all these years. This was one of the major how-to guides in the early years of the web, and it's the very guide that I used to teach myself HTML one weekend in 1996, from which this very site you're reading has since evolved. I was surprised it lasted so long, but over the years I have recommended it to a great many people interested in web development, including as recently as this past spring. It had such a comfortable lay-terms approach while most other guides are hopelessly technical, and that's silly since HTML is a very accessible, easy-to-use language and anybody should be able to pick it up, but maybe I only think that because I had a good guide to teach me. Thanks for everything, NCSA.
Two Replies to So Long, NCSA Primer
Scott Hardie | August 30, 2006
W3Schools has always been my second recommendation. It's highly technically specific and you can find the precise syntax requirements you need – but they're just not good at explaining it on a conceptual level so that someone just starting out can see the forest for the trees. php.net has the same problem for the php language: Technically precise, but almost zero context that would foster understanding.
As for the others, I guess I'll have to get familiar with them so I know other good places to send someone from now on.
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
Tom's Ball Smells Like Apple Pie
For the last four months, I've spent Tuesdays at a bowling alley playing in a just-for-fun league. Score was kept, but the mood was friendly and non-competitive, except for one of my teammates who kept competing with us instead of the other teams. :-) I struggled with it at first, partly because I thought I was signing up for a six-week league and it turned out to be a sixTEEN-week league, and partly because my skills had somehow diminished even though I'm in better shape now. Go »Flak Album
Lately I've been enjoying Aimee Mann's I'm with Stupid. Oh, how I wish she'd saved that title for a duets album. Go »Red Carpet Saturday
Some friends of ours recently made a short film (they're officially in IMDb) that got into the Sarasota Film Festival, so Kelly and I had to check it out. It screened with eight other short family-friendly films on a Saturday morning, and there was good turnout for the two locally-made titles in the set. I enjoyed our friends' comedy and laughed along with everyone else, and I was impressed by several of the other movies too. Go »Doppelgänger
I saw myself at the grocery. Tall, fat, shaved head, black collared shirt, black slacks, black leather shoes. I caught up to myself and muttered "I like the look" with a wink, and myself smiled, then myself's girlfriend saw us together and laughed. Go »Downtown A-Town
I can't write about why I spent the week in Atlanta because it's too confidential and work-related, but I can say that I had a good time around the margins of that event. The first day was the only loss. I got so little sleep the night before (seemingly a part of every trip I take) that I spent it groggy and exhausted. Go »
Amy Austin | August 30, 2006
Hm, that's too bad -- but there are three re-directs offered, which leads me to wonder how your estimation of these alternatives compares to your Old Faithful...