How much HTML do you know?

About 12 years ago, I was pretty up on HTML- CSS and all the good stuff. I’d been the lead developer on customizing a web logistics package in about 2000, and in 2002, I was second banana to another guy on a major rewrite of the site (the other guy had been a dedicated web developer for years, while I was more of a 4GL programmer/BA by that point).

Haven’t touched it since though.

I teach web design at my high school. I teach the basic HTML including dropdown menus, heavy CSS work and basic javascript to rotate pictures, make a clock etc. Even with these basics handprogramming is so versatile that my students can make pages that look better than 80% of whats on the web so take that for what you will.

As long as the <blink> tag still works, I’m golden.

I can do pretty much anything in HTML, with maybe a refresher for the oddly named table tags. And I can handle all of CSS except actual layout. That I pretty have to use a graphical tool. I just can’t picture it in text.

It’s been deprecated (yay!). However, it exists and is optional in CSS (browsers are explicitly allowed to ignore display: blink), and you can simulate it using JavaScript.

(Incidentally, try typing “blink tag” into Google…)

Punch cards? I wrote a boot loader or two on a punch card! (Yes, really.)

(But you couldn’t run it over a network, this being a 1950’s vintage machine that it ran on.)

50 years ago I used multiple-punch to create object decks for the IBM 1620.
40 years ago I dialed microinstructions into the rotary switches of an IBM 370 console.
30 years ago I used root adb -k to patch object code in live Unix disk drivers.
(These days I’m retired but have my own websites hand-coded in html and javascript.)

Screw the blink tag anyway, I’ll be over here with my BFF <marquee>.

Anyway, to directly answer the OP, I used to be okay with HTML and knew enough CSS to edit a stylesheet but not write one from scratch. I wrote the old website for my school’s newspaper. This was only 2007 or so and I wish I knew about actual web server programming, because whenever we had a new article I had to spend forever copying the text into the page, then updating all the “related” and “more by” links on all the previous pages.

I really don’t have any interest in web programming and never bothered to learn it, this really hurt my job prospects when I graduated. I was in an awkward position where I needed a job until grad school, but the timing was weird enough that with standard apartment lease lengths I couldn’t really move, and everything around me is web programming. (Well, okay, and hardcore missile testing and stuff, but that tends to require a physics degree and I feel uncomfortable working on new ways to blow up brown people). I know entry-level job applications overdo qualifications, but even the “reasonable” ones I didn’t come close to the qualifications for.

I mean, yeah, the ones that want you to know C#, Java, PHP, ASP, Python, Ruby, Javascript, JQuery, SQL, and so on for an entry level position are probably just clueless HR people or a company with a Lovecraftian codebase nightmare, but even “basic” position wanted a staggering number of web frameworks, portfolio work, database languages, and such. I’ve always done more scientific computing, theoretical Comp Sci, computer graphics, and AI research. More of the mathy programming.

In all honesty, I could probably do web programming pretty competently for an entry level if I was forced to (at least back-end, non-cryptography stuff), I mean I learned two new languages, two new libraries, and a bunch of hardware nonsense just last week for a research project, but it’s staggering how different the entry-level qualifications of a commercial software engineer and someone interested in academic comp sci are. I was not focusing in that direction at all and I basically was dead in the water given that the majority of graduates specifically focused on that stuff. “I wrote an open source 3D vector math library” doesn’t seem to impress people who need a pretty webpage for their dentist office much for some bizarre reason when your competition is a guy who has three personal blogs written entirely in custom-hacked Django or Rails.

When it came down to it, I didn’t have the time to truly pick up all those qualifications. I mean, I guess I could have told half-truths on the applications and said I know Javascript (I hacked Cookie Clicker once!), but when it came down to it I really wasn’t familiar with any of the half-billion in-vogue web design and database technologies or frameworks, and that’s really what they need/want.

I worked on a web newspaper at university in about 1995/1996. We wrote our copy directly in HTML.

Two words ---------- punch cards.

I started tinkering around with HTML when I was 13, that was around 2000. All the cool kids had Geocities sites ;), I wanted one too!

I really liked doing it, learned the basics on my own as a hobby during high school, then went for the piece of paper certifying me so employers took me seriously. We’re about 5 years behind everything where I live, so at the time it wasn’t like employers saw your github repo and decided to hire you!

I got out of it earlier this year. Like I said, we’re about 5 years behind here and I was getting tired of having to fight with clients about stuff standard in techier places like responsive design and ditching earlier versions of IE to take advantage of newer features. I also wanted to move closer to my hometown where the industry is even smaller. I still work in an Internet-related job though, the web is my true love. :slight_smile:

I handcode everything, we just have shortcuts like frameworks, jQuery and CSS helpers like LESS and SASS.

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I’m so old…How old are you?

Two older words -------- plug boards.

Bonus: to document your plug board program, you would take careful close-up Polaroid photos of the board.