Diving In

I own all of the Head First series. I'll say the style is starting to grate on me, but I still get the books because it's still one of the more original ways to explain stuff I've seen.

After veering into more sophisticated topics, JSP and Design Patterns, the latest book has aimed a bit simpler, with the goal of explaining HTML, CSS, and XHTML. I've always wanted to learn CSS, even if I find HTML kind of a pain in general. It's shown its resilience by not disappearing.

I would have thought, ten years after it came out, that some other de facto standard would have replaced it. The key has always been to get those folks who make browsers to implement your stuff. The closest rival, and it's a long shot by far, appear to be Flash, which uses ActionScript as the language to drive a certain kind of display.

I would have thought people would have created a language that allows you to control layout much better, even if that's antithetical to the original purpose of HTML, which was to describe the content, not its layout. But when you do that, you generally create universally crappy layout regardless of broswer.

Hopefully, it'll be a good read.