Wednesday, April 10, 2013

HTML in the Journalism World

Today in class my professor posed the question to me; Should journalists be made to learn HTML coding in their course of study? I was initially floored by the question, then I got defensive.

Of course not, why pile on one more topic of debatable use for me to learn before I graduate?

It wasn't until I gave it a second thought that I realized that the ability to write code can aid in web design and structure, and while hardly the focus of a journalism career, it can be a useful qualification to have at a time when you've never expect to need it.

For me, learning HTML would actually be a refresher on my old web design class in high school, which seems so far in the past I'm not sure If i even remember anything I learned from it. I made a St. Patricks Day website, I remember, probably the most hideously ugly bright green webpage you'd ever have the misfortune to load. It had all sorts of super amazing special effects, wavy gold lettering, and I seem to remember something about a jumping dog emote.

In case you want a little extra information on HTML, w3schools.com has a pretty informative walk through page. However, I would caution the novice user of HTML,my phantom website is still out there in the web, just waiting to trap some poor soul. Don't be the irresponsible web creator that I once was, if you make a mess, clean up after yourself.

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