[The Lion]

I think I read on the 'markup' that you have a degree in this, right? Was it a Master's?

I'm thinking about going back to school for this, that's why I ask. But I'm curious: Did you degree specifically for web design within the Computer Science field? Or do you have to get a degree in Computer Science in order to have the freedom to follow any path you wish?

[haku]

Day jobs never do. They just fund the good stuff that we do around them!

I gotta say, Herk was a big influence on my programming valid code. Im doing the xhtml strict as well. Still working on semantics though - thats a lot harder!

[marcamos]

The Lion, on Jan 18 2008, 06:44 AM, said:

I think I read on the 'markup' that you have a degree in this, right? Was it a Master's?

I'm thinking about going back to school for this, that's why I ask. But I'm curious: Did you degree specifically for web design within the Computer Science field? Or do you have to get a degree in Computer Science in order to have the freedom to follow any path you wish?

I do have a degree, but it's in general computer networking/IT stuff - nothing to do with web design/markup. As for requirements that lead to certain career paths, I'm not sure. I thought I wanted to be a network administrator, so that's what I got my degree in. I dabbled in web design/markup for a couple years, then back in 2005 I started taking it seriously and dived very deeply into best practices. For the past three years, design/xhtml/css is all I've done for 6 - 14 hours a day.

haku, on Jan 18 2008, 07:08 AM, said:

I gotta say, Herk was a big influence on my programming valid code. Im doing the xhtml strict as well. Still working on semantics though - thats a lot harder!

Thanks for the nod . I'd say that learning semantics is actually quite easy - many people make it harder on themselves than they need to. Just about everything you learned in grade-school serves as the fundamental rule-set for applying semantics to markup. Simply judge every piece of content by saying to yourself "What is this chunk of content? Is it a paragraph <p>? Is it a list of things and does it need to be in order <ol> or not <ul>? Is it quoting someone else (<q> or <blockquote>)? Is it a division of the layout (<div>)? Is this point meant to be emphasized a little (<em>), or a lot (<strong>)? etc. etc."

It becomes a lot easier to write semantic markup when you ask yourself those questions. The slightly harder parts are simply memorizing the proper elements to use for a given type of content and ignoring what they do to the rendered design at first. By that, I mean that too many people decide on certain elements based on how they render in the browser, which makes me sick. A professional markup writer chooses their elements based on their semantic value and uses CSS to manipulate how they look in the website.