I learned HTML in the mid-1990s. It still works, but since the mid-2000s we’re told that HTML now sucks, and that every tag from the era is either “depreciated” or seriously frowned upon.
Then.
<B>This is bold.</b>
Now.
<style type=“text/css”>
.bold
{
font-weight: bold;
}
</style>
<div class=“bold”>This is bold.</div>
Yeah. That’s much easier than before. :rolleyes:
My first job after school: in 1986, I was in the drafting room, drawing plans of equipment cabinets in black ink on frosted mylar. Yes, I operated one of the ammonia-based print-making machines. Yes, it stank. I later went on to electronics, and then changed jobs, so I never saw when the company switched to CAD.
And another one: I got my ham radio license in 1992, just as the Internet was beginning its rise to prominence. In the following fe years, the number of hams on the airwaves would drop sharply, leaving nothing but old farts that spent hours on a repeater holding forth on their medical maladies, the weather, “damn no-code techs”, and how Bill Clinton was leading the country to ruin. Basically, this.
The advantage is, you can then change the characteristics of the “bold” style by adjusting things in one place in the CSS description, rather than adjusting every bold tag in the document.
It also separates indication of appearance–formatting–from indication of the nature of the content.
Imagine that you’re using bold in some places to indicate poster names, and in other places for emphasis. What happens if you want to make poster names red? You can’t just change all bold tags to red tags; that would redden all your emphasis as well. You’d have to go through and make a decision about each tag.
Instead, in the CSS description, you declare one style for “poster name” and another style for “emphasis”. Initially, in the CSS, you set both of them to be bold. But then, you can just change “poster name” to be red, and only the “poster name” elements will change; the “emphasis” elements remain bold.
It doesn’t start out as simple as just using a bold tag, but it makes things much simpler later.
True, but it has become obsolete for me, a regular guy who just makes basic pages using Dreamweaver. I rarely tweak code myself, if ever.
I don’t entirely agree here. I mean, yeah, the internet banking and things like Quicken, Mint etc. simplify the arithmetic, but you really do still need to record transactions somewhere in case the bank makes a mistake, you have an outstanding check or whatever. Even with online bill-pay, you might have a check outstanding for a payee who can’t be paid electronically, you need to know what you expect your payments to be, etc.
But there are plenty of jobs out there that do use it. So it is still a valid skill, even if you personally do not use it anymore.
Hell, I was doing some yesterday.
Does not compute.
Usenet, Telnet and FTP are all currently used by large amounts of people.
My first film-production job after moving to L.A. was as a production assistant, and I got teamed up with the editor. One of my main duties was to load the Movieola for viewing dailies. Loading the Movieola was involved, and took me a while to learn how to do it right.
This would have been around '93 or '94 or so, and although it was another two years or so before AVID had pretty much completely taken over, it was a skill I never needed to use again.
Exactly.
What using CSS does is move a bit more of your workload to the front of your timetable, when you have to decide on the style names that you’re going to use, but it saves heaps of time later on.
A bunch of times, i’ve arrived at the end of writing a page, and i step back and look and say “Wow, those subheadings are a bit too big.” Instead of doing a laborious search through the whole document, or a complicated Replace All, i just change the style in the CSS sheet and, bam, everything is fixed. And you can do it site-wide, rather than having to go page by page.
It’s actually the same sort of principle as using styles properly in word processing documents like MS Word. Some years back, i did some editing of a document for a professor, and her 40-page paper had something like 45 different styles associated with various parts of the paper. It wasn’t that she needed them all; it’s just that, whenever she wanted to make a section of the paper look different, she selected some new combination of font, bold, italics, size, etc.
She actually only needed about 5 or 6 different styles, and was amazed when i showed her how to define a style and allocate it to a section of a document. She was even more amazed when i showed how, by simply modifying the style, she could make the same change to every instance of that style in the document, all at once.
Interestingly, the rise of Content Management Systems is pushing aside even complex, expensive software like Dreamweaver. there are plenty of web desginers now who make a living by setting up sites using CMS like Joomla and Drupal and WordPress.
Of course, customizing these sites at a level required by corporate clients requires a good knowledge of all the backend stuff, including HTML, CSS, and sometimes even PHP. But with all the plugins available, it’s actually relatively easy to get a nice website up and running without too much except a Joomla for Dummies book.
Yes, FTP is the best way I know to send a very large file – several GB, say – from a computer in one location to a specific computer in another location. And that’s something that I, at least, do quite often.
Drafting by hand with pencils and blueprinting, right before CAD eventually became mainstream.
Authoring raw HTML before GUI and WYSIWYG environments turned it into a rare tweaking usage.
Tennis with a wooden racket, right before aluminum and graphite became mainstream and changed the game 
Configuring and optimizing config.sys and himem on DOS programs to get them to run in Windows.
Which isn’t to say FTP should ever be confused with a good protocol.
FTP Delenda Est!
