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Zombie Webmonkey: Back From the Dead?
Mirkon writes "Back in mid-February, the news was broken that Webmonkey, one of the web's most prominent web development tutorial and reference resources, was "shut down," in that no new content would be delivered. A little over four months later - though Wired News (another child of Webmonkey's parent company, Terra Lycos) says nothing, and the Webmonkey Blog (hosted on Tripod, another Terra Lycos subsidiary) hasn't seen an update since January - the Webmonkey home page boldly declares: "We're totally back! Webmonkey is alive and kicking, serving up new articles all hot-n-fresh like a stack of banana pancakes. With syrup." Is this the end of the end for Webmonkey?"
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Not quite.. driving a car is closer to browsing the resultant webpage.
Creating a page without knowing HTML/CSS is like assembling an entire car without knowing how any of the pieces work. It may work for very, very simple cars but if something goes wrong, or happens not the way you expect, you have no idea what's wrong or how to fix it.
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Millah, old bean, I meant what I said: you don't need to understand the internals of the MS HTML Control or the Gecko Runtime Environment or IIS or Apache, which is what's "under the hood", but if you don't know HTML then it's like driving a car while being functionally illiterate. I know quite a few people people who are functionally illiterate in English who have no problem driving a car so long as they know where they're going, or they've got someone to help them, or they stay in the part of Houston where I live where all the street-signs are in English and Chinese.
So, you can get along not knowing HTML, but you won't have the faintest idea what to do if anything goes wrong. If you get into the equivalent of a strange part of town, you're stuck. If there's a detour, you better hope you understand which set of arrows to follow...
I've found myself training some young newbs in the finer points of web dev. I notice that despite my best efforts in explanation I often slip bits of techno jargon in which leave my trainees looking confused and bewildered. Though I hadn't used webmonkey in years (ie. my newb days) I remembered that jargon was either avoided or thoughtfully introduced, something I seemed incapable of doing. So now I create lists of webmonkey articles for my newbs to peruse prior to their hands-on lessons with me. Long story short, webmonkey is a great resource for beginners but a bit dumbed down for the slashdot crowd.