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Admin
It's worth noting that knowledge of a subject and ability to teach it effectively are hardly synonymous. Two of the best teachers I ever had were pretty weak in their actual subjects, but they could *teach*.
OTOH, I had a social studies teacher in high school who not only couldn't teach, but who literally could not find Brazil on a map of South America. I distinctly recall saying, "No, no, remember -- Brazil, big country, always yellow?" to her. The fact that I got away with that is another clue as to her abilities...
Admin
English is a language, but that fact alone doesn't make it a programming language.
In fact, the point is made even clearer by the 'M' in HTML - it's a Markup language. So, definitely not a programming language. Thanks for clearing up that point with your own insightful example :)
Admin
What a brillant professor!
Admin
sound like some nurban legend....i.e. fake
Has the original poster posted additional comments backing this shit up ?
Admin
As a former graduate student instructor, I found myself constantly urging my students to complain and keep complaining about this sort of "teaching." I told them repeatedly that they were paying for the class and they should hold the school responsible for delivering an acceptable "product." Very few students took me up on my suggestions but those that did were at least glad they did as it gave them more of a sense of control.
I am often aghast at what I hear about the quality of teaching at all levels in the US. OTOH, I know of many REALLY good teachers. It's too bad that students don't take more responsibility for their education. I'm afraid it's built into our authoritarian educational model. Sigh.
Anne
Admin
God forbid someone teach basics anymore. I couldn't see why anyone might teach.. first year students the basics and, perhaps, the flavors of the industry. Its not like people don't know how to use this stuff automatically, or are not exposed to it all from birth.
Mainly the idea (as hard as it is for someone who already knows this stuff) is to expose students to the things they will be learning and using for the rest of their lives (if they choose that major). What's wrong with doing that? So you have some stuff to test out of, big deal.
Tim
Admin
Seriously, I think it's good to teach HTML in CS classes.
You know, how hard it is when I tried to hire a decent Web Programmer with good HTML skills. Once one of them just tried to delete tables in a page prepared by web designer because he believe wrapping too many layers (there was only 3 layers actually) of tables would make the postback not functional, and in fact that's because he has accidentally deleted a closing form tag.
They may not need to be experts in using HTML, but some basic understanding of how it works and what are the capabilities/limitations should be good for them.
Admin
So wait, HTML isn't a programming language?
Admin
try this
<HTML>
<HAT>I'm a HAT...</HAT>
<HEAD>I'm a HEAD...</HEAD>
<NECK>I'm a NECK...</NECK>
<BODY>I'm a BODY...</BODY>
<FOOT>I'm a FOOT...</FOOT>
<SHOE>I'm a SHOE...</SHOE>
<FLOOR>I'm a FLOOR...</FLOOR>
</HTML>
Admin
A program is a sequence of instructions.. Programming is creating a sequence of instructions. So HTML authoring is programming... A language is a predifine set of valid instruction sequences - so how can you say HTML is not a programming language?
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/programming "to predetermine the thinking, behavior, or operations of as if by computer programming"
Admin
HTML is a ( big long ) set of parameters to to a compiled application. HTML is not a programming language.
Admin
Admin
As sad as it is, I find it much easier to believe that someone so incompent in the subject matter ends up teaching a class as opposed to being a student in the same class. Maybe the instructor who was originally scheduled to teach decided to quit and the department decided to put in the least recently used warm body avalable, hoping no one would notice.
Admin
Mmm, no. The original poster was right, an HTML page can not start with a <body> tag and still be valid, just not for the reason he stated The real reason is that the url=http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/]specification[/url] requires that a <title> tag be present:
and that title tags must be in the (implicit or explicit) head section before the body. Skipping straight to <body> causes validators to throw document type does not allow element "BODY" here.
Admin
Ok, I take offence. I used to be a programmer (No, they didn't fire me. I quit on my own) and now I teach at one of the colleges. I do know how to turn on a computer and I know my share of HTML tags. I don't teach web development, though. So, this switch from programmer to teacher is voluntary, not because "I can't do, so I teach".
Admin
By your definition, HTML is not a programming language, as HTML documents are not a sequence of instructions; they define the structure and content of the document in a purely declarative manner. Additionally, it's not even anywhere near turing-complete. I think it's safe to say that a language completely incapable of even basic arithmetic isn't a programming language.
Admin
^^
You guys (and gals) are amazing, it's 7:11 in the morning here (hellas) i thought it'd be fun to browse your site (something i've been doing every morning for the past couple of months or so), till today i'd only laugh and say "omg .. this can't be true...pfff humans" ... today it was different, i actually DID say "WTF" wow, keep up the good work :P
Admin
An university where people go to lectures, WTF? You should be getting drunk, because the mandatory assignments can be finished within a few hours before deadline anyway. :-)
Admin
(insert ColdFusion flamewar here)
Admin
Admin
He didn't say the HTML *element* is optional. He said the <HTML> and </HTML> tags are optional. The element will always get created, whether the tags are present or not.
Admin
A page must have the HTML, HEAD and BODY *elements*, but the <HTML>, </HTML>, <HEAD>, </HEAD>, <BODY> and </BODY> tags are all optional. See
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.3
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.4.1
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.5.1
Admin
HTML, XML, and SQL are all examples of domain-specific programming languages. Unlike general purpose programming languages, domain-specific languages need not be Turing-complete.
Admin
Sadly, this just reinforces that old (and often untrue) adage: those who can, do; those who can't do, teach; those who can't teach, teach gym; and those who can't teach gym, teach Introduction to Web Development at WTFU
we in our contry have another nice saying about the distribution of knowledge in academic world:
Student must know everything. Assistant teachers needs only to know stuff in textbooks. Docent must know, where textbooks are stored. And professor must only know, where docent is...
BTW: In my university, this was what PROFESSORS were saying about themselves.
Admin
I for one would. I know how to edit text, I don't need to learn it again from vi fanatics, much in the same way that I know how to read, and don't need to learn it again from scientologists.
captcha: java
Admin
Using IP of 333.333.333.333 might have been deliberate? Like, say www.example.com is specifically designed to be used as an example.
Admin
You left that program because you were weak. Real CS programs use Scheme as the introductory language because it weeds people like you out.
Admin
Actually, I believed this, too (until 9 or 10th grade). Why? A Book on Programming my brother gave me had it in there. WTF!
It also had a nasty error in its explanation of the way a for-loop works in C. Basically, it said that the ++ operator in a for statement would influence when the counting variable is incremented - before or after the evaluation (!)... so according to the book, in a for(int i = 0; i < 10; ++i) the loop will start at 1; while in for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++) will start at 0.
This is actually a subtle thing, because you pretty much never use ++i (why would you?). But every now and then, this gave me off-by-one errors in weird places. Took me 10 years (!) to figure that one out, and it was very embarrassing when discussing a particularly complex off-by-one error with a colleague and he suddenly went "Umm, no, for loops don't work like that.".
I now always question the accuracy of my reading material, especially the material that tries to teach me the basics about something. Sheesh...
Admin
That's more or less the level of "education" I got over at http://www.bib.de/ - at least from some of the teachers, at least half were fine.
Admin
Admin
Re: HTML/HEAD/BODY tags
The elements are required, but the tags are implied in HTML 4.01. It's pretty ugly, but that's the way it is.
I would recommend sticking to a subset of HTML 4.01 Strict that is more forward-compatible, though: always close opened tags (except for self-closing tags, which should never be closed with a tag in HTML 4.01), always use the tags for implied elements, keep element names to lower case, etc.
Why? Simple: it's easier to switch to XHTML and XML if you're used to writing HTML like that. Same reason I wouldn't recommend using the Transitional DTD.
Re: HTML as a programming language
As there are multiple definitions for what constitutes a programming language or a program, it's not strictly wrong to say HTML is a programming language. It does make things rather difficult though.
HTML, as of the start of the Semantic Web Initiative, is a semantic mark-up language. It allows marking up the structure and semantics of a hypertext document. Without the (deprecated) presentational mark-up, there isn't much left which could be described as "instructions" for an "HTML interpreter".
By opening the definition of what constitutes a program enough to allow for HTML documents to be called programs, the definition becomes too vague for all practical matters -- RTF, XML, etc could all be called programming languages rather than formats then. All of these don't actually do anything, but serve as input files for software to generate some form of output.
It's usually better to use a stricter definition for what constitutes a program or programming language than that.
Re: IE strict mode
IE's strict mode isn't "strict" in the same sense Gecko's strict mode is strict. That's why Gecko browsers usually have three rendering modes: Quirks, Standard (MSIE) and Standard. MSIE 7 may not be quite as horrible anymore, but this still holds true for all versions prior to 7.0.
Re: HTML is for graphics guys
NO, IT'S NOT. Despite what lazy programmers will say, graphics guys SUCK at HTML. That doesn't mean programmers are necessarily better at it, but at least they are closer to it than any graphics designer could ever be.
HTML has nothing to do with graphics design. It's about marking up text to structure it semantically. That doesn't have much to do with programming, but it's hardly relevant to graphics design.
Graphics designers make the design. The web monkey (preferably the same guy who does the server-side coding) creates the HTML templates and creates a CSS stylesheet that reflects that design. If the graphics guy is savvy enough, he can create the CSS instead.
Saying graphics designers should create the HTML files (which they will usually do via some stupid non-sense like Adobe's cut-up-and-paste-into-a-table export function) is like saying translators should write the internationalisation language files (or, if you're using a database instead: maintain the internationalisation database). Unlike they are experienced with and used to the file format, they will do a worse job than any code monkey with a basic grasp of how languages work would (who SHOULD as per his qualification be able to adapt new languages and dialects pretty easily, whereas the translator/artist is entirely out of his domain once he is confronted with such).
Re: HTML vs XHTML
Most people using XHTML should be shot. Google "XHTML considered harmful" to find out why -- in essence, most people using "XHTML" actually send tag soup as they use the wrong MIME type (because MSIE 7.x and older can not parse application/xhtml+xml documents and thus try to download them instead -- this is intentional because the dev team decided not to support XHTML rather than having broken support for a language which has strict syntax rules).
If you do it right (e.g. only use a subset of XHTML and HTML so you can convert from HTML to XHTML or vice versa depending on what the browser prefers/understands -- or use an XML base and convert that via XSLT server-side), there's nothing bad about XHTML (apart from being a buzzword used by clueless management a lot), though.
CAPTCHA: hotdog. Yumm!
Admin
I was going to complain about the insinuation that there is something incorrect about refering to HTML as "the program" and Internet Explorer as the "runtime environment" ('run it in Internet Explorer'); but when I got to the part about this dim-wit being the teacher, I decided that this really is a WTF.
However, HTML is a 'language', as we all should know, and it is perfectly reasonable to refer to running it within IE.
Admin
This teacher is obviously really stupid. Everybody knows that on a web devevlopment course she should have been teaching Flash, not HTML. Unbeleivable ;-)
Admin
I was once in a work-group for a Human-Computer Interaction course with a guy who was simultaneously my TA in Algorithms and Data-structures. He was a good hard-core computer-science PhD student, totally at home with the Algorithmics, totally at sea with HCI. I had to use all my internal ethical resources not to exploit the situation in an "I'll write the next HCI report and you'll go easy on my end-of-term Algorithms project" sort of way. Fortunately, being a superhero, I owned both courses anyway :-)
Admin
Fantastic, another proof of how dumb some pepole are :/ Fantastic, NOT!
Admin
I don't understand several of the comments suggesting that a CS course shouldn't teach web-development at all. Why on earth not? My CS degree included a short (seven-week) web-dev course (based around http://www.brics.dk/ixwt/ ) with a focus on http/html/css, xml/dtd/schemas/xpath/xslt and jsp & servlets. The only pre-requisite was Introduction to Programming. Ok, it wasn't rocket surgery, but it was a good relevant basic introduction to an important area of practical computing. Why shouldn't that be part of a CS degree?
Admin
I prefer the "spaghetti" paradigm. :p
Admin
At the paragraph before last. I started breathing deeply, and deeply, and deeply.
And "Oh, fuck" could be heard from me if listening carefully.
"Oh man, this is a joke, this is just a joke, this is someone's silly joke....". No more thoughts.
Admin
Admin
Having laughed at the article, proceding thru the comments... I can't believe there are more WTF's in the comments than the article itself.
The discussion about the HTML elements especially... The spec is quite clear ofcourse and allthough it may be bad practice to leave out those HTML, HEAD and BODY tags, it's not invalid. Just like 1 character variable names like A are valid for most languages, it's bad practice and should be avoided. But it's still valid.
And to those who still think HTML is a programming language, I'd like to see your HTML program where you calculate 1+1... I've seen a lot of programming languages and all are at least able to calculate that... I dare you! :)
As for the teacher (back to the article) trying to proof her point by using IE - she should be banned from the internet. Allthough IE is still my favorite browser, it is by no means a good guide to whether your HTML is valid or not. A table with missing </tr>'s will be rendered fine usually in IE but it's not valid :)
A long long time ago (about 25 years I think) I had a teacher that needed to teach BASIC. As brilliant as she apparently was in AS400 mainframes (according to other teachers at least), she didn't know first thing about BASIC. She always tried to prepare for the next class as well as she could, any questions that were not part of that day's class she was unable to answer. It's a common problem with a shortage of teachers that the teacher isn't able to teach the particular subject.
Admin
Although I'm not proud of it, the situation looks vaguely familiar.
As with many schools in the early 90's (not sure if it's still like that) any teacher/prof that was vaguely related to 'math' was apparently "gifted by nature" to be able to teach CS. Luckily, CS was just one of those "Our school is with the time, look at our Hi-Tech computer lab where we teach CS two hours a week to our students" things. Spending quite a lot of my spare time on comuters/BBS/electronics/etc ... I could be considered rather 'knowledgeable' about the subject and didn't expect too much new stuff of those classes. I couldn't have been more right :
Lesson one (two hours !!!) : a computer consists of : a TV-like thing we call "the monitor", a wedge shaped typewriter we call "the keyboard" and a white box we call "the computer"
Lesson two (two more gruesome hours) : when we put "the box" on its' side, we call it "a tower"
After those two lessons I concluded I might just as well skip that class for the rest of the year and spend my Thursday morning getting some extra sleep.
Being only half-organized it had to happen off course that I arrived early one Thursday morning and since I didn't have much else to do, I joined to group into what would be my third CS lesson.
The first hour was spent on showing that by using POKE to a certain address you could switch a LED linked to a pin on the parallel port ON and OFF (black magic!) and by putting that into a loop it would look 'dimmed' because of the sheer speed of the LED going on and off... (oohss and aaahhss)
The second hour started out with a description of the floppy disk. How the thing has 2 sides, 80 tracks and 17 sectors of 512 bytes. Something sounded fishy here, but I couldn't put my finger on it right away. So he continues to explain why there are 17 sectors : because 17 is a prime. As a consequence, you could spin the disk around and let it stop at any given position and then there was this 45-minute theory of somehow 17 being prime allowed you to find out which sector was underneath the head. The teacher was actually well-versed in mathematics and the theory kind of made sense (it was a lot to take into in a short period of time, especially if you know that "a box on the side = tower" took 2 hours) but the buzzing in my head went on and suddenly I realised that there are not 17, but 18 sectors on a disk (numbered 0 to 17). I quickly do a sectors * heads * cylinders * size and what do you know, you need 18 sectors to get to 1.44Mb. So I raise my hand, get his attention and kindly ask if it wouldn't be possible that there are 18 sectors per track. The guy is stunned for such public blasphemy and simply stares at me for a couple of seconds. I then start explaining that using a simple multiplication it clearly shows you need 18 of them, but that the confusion probably comes from the 0..17 numbering.
So he checks the math for himself, goes through some books and eventually agrees with me. Twenty seconds later could hear the entire class go : "but, 18 isn't prime !?!"... given the look the teacher gave me, he had already figured that one out too and now was probably trying to read my name from my face.
Let's say I was saved by the bell another minute later... and I never went to a CS class ever again... Exams were kinda hard, but luckily I had remembered the box on the side name =)
Admin
By your logic, everyone who writes a Word document would be a programmer.
A HTML document can be the interface to a program, either via JavaScript or a server based program, but it can never be a program on its own.
Admin
Unfortunately, your last point is utter bullshit. Some people consider XHTML harmful, but others, like me, use it because we use other tools like XSL and XML parsers which don't work correctly on HTML documents. Use whats right for you, not what some "expert" decided is correct, because he/she can't see the use for it. Besides, sending it as text/html to incompatible browsers isn't all that troublesome if you actually know what you're doing.
Admin
I pretty much agree. Who would need to be taught database handling, server-side scripting, DOM properties and all these things? That sound like a job for a Web Development For Dummies book for me...
Nah. Web development is something you learn fast, in one or two days. Maybe hours. HTML is teh eesee. And everyone knows that everything is done in HTML and a bunch of gif anims.
Oups, I forgot to add a </sarcasm> tag.
Admin
And what if HTML is programming language ? http://www.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis400/html/html.html
Admin
Ooops! Pardon.
Admin
From the quoted w3c spec, it would seem that the META tag is required and if the BODY tag is present then DIV/SPAN, HEADING and ADDRESS tags are also required.
Is that right?
Admin
Those elements are not required, but if you use them the tags are (except for the META closing tag which is not even allowed). Similarly, the HTML, HEAD and BODY elements are required but their tags are not.
Admin
Ouch. This, my friend, deserves front page by itself.
Admin
Americans fing the '555' in the second octet amusing because it is common in US movies/tv that a phone number is always faked with '555' in the exchange, or second group of numbers after the area code.