Your Worst IT Workshop?

suntory writes "I am a lecturer at a Spanish university. This week had to attend a workshop on 'Advanced HTML and CSS' for the university staff. Some of the ideas that the presenter (a fellow lecturer) shared with us: IE is the only browser that follows standards; frames and tables are the best way to organize your website; you can view the source for most CSS, Javascript and HTML files, so you can freely copy and paste what you feel like — the Internet is free you know; same applies for images, if you can see them in Google Images Search, then you can use them for your projects. Of course, the workshop turned out to be a complete disaster and a waste of time. So I was wondering what other similar experiences you have had, and what was your worst IT workshop?"

Comments

Vendor Name?

[securityfolk]

If you can, could you provide the name of the vendor who gave that course? I would like to avoid them at all costs :)

Let's go the other way

[PHAEDRU5]

Since the difference between intelligence and stupidity is that there's a limit on intelligence, let's try naming the *best* conferences we've been to.

I've been to OOPSLA a couple of times. Very enjoyable and informative. More recently, I just attended a "No Fluff, Just Stuff" conferences in Atlanta. Lots of good information, especially on Groovy and Grails.

HTML, CSS and Websites

[Archangel Michael]

While HTML and CSS are important to know still, I can't help but wonder how many people actually still build websites with HTML and CSS and Java and such? I stopped using plain HTML at least four years ago, when I discovered Content Management Systems (WebGUI back then, now using Joomla). I've built or helped build dozens of sites, all part time, using CMS, and most of my clients couldn't be happier. They have access to add content all day long, and don't have to worry about "design".

If I went to a Web seminar like the one described in the story, and it didn't mention building sites on top of a CMS, I'd question the presenter and the company that paid for me to go. There is no reason that your average person needs to know HTML or CSS, as those should be handed over to DESIGNERS, people skilled with making things look good. If you want to see what it looks like when everyday people do design just go over to MySpace (akkkk).

Just my $.02 (actual value subject to market forces)

Re:HTML, CSS and Websites

[moderatorrater]

Your post really only applies to static html, which is not what most seminars are geared towards. If you're doing anything dynamic with a page, then doing the HTML and CSS by hand is almost always the best option. Using any WYSIWYG editor is going to give you shitty html that's nearly impossible to edit after the fact, and very few are able to work around code. I've had php CMSs that stripped out all the php and javascript in the files when it saved them, so customers or dumbass designers would use the CMS to change the design on a dynamic page and suddenly it's not dynamic anymore.

Haven't been to many, but

[Lightborn]

back in the Tivoli days I got sent to a 2-day class on how to use it. It was about totally worthless.

I found out the next week that the class had cost $750, and I actually went into the CEO's office and suggested to him that next time they want me to know something, they pay me the $750 and I'd purchase and read the appropriate book. He wasn't especially amused.

sometimes training is not done for the training

[wikinerd]

pay me the $750 and I'd purchase and read the appropriate book

You are of course correct, but if you speak with some business people you will be surprised why some businesses (and even individuals) take courses and enroll their staff to workshops and training sessions. Sometimes training is done not in order to actually learn something, but only because of various external requirements (eg legal, or requirements imposed or recommended by professional bodies), obscure accounting motives, publicity or advertising reasons ("we spent a million in staff training last year!"), hierarchical or careerist reasons ("manager: I will enroll my staff in extensive training so that my boss can't use their lack of skills as an excuse to fire me for hiring incompetent employees" or even "I, as the training manager, must make everyone attend training sessions because it's good for making me more important within the company"), or sometimes even irrational psychological reasons ("if we lose, it won't be because we didn't try hard but because out training was useless, so it's the trainer's problem not ours"). Yea I know all this is completely anti-productive and irrational, but I have actually seen all this being done in dysfunctional companies (sometimes even required by external agencies or bodies).

Question for the submitter

[apparently]

Did you do the attendees a favor and correct the lecturer, or did you just let the misinformation run wild?

Re:Not the worst for *me*...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach" - old adage that my PhD advisor used to repeat all the time ;) That adage is complete crap. Effectively passing knowledge on to students in a way that results in them actually learning something is nontrivial.

Re:Not the worst for *me*...

[littlerubberfeet]

Those who can, do.

Those who can do more, teach.

Re:IDIOT

[cp.tar]

Hey, you had it great.

A teacher does not by definition know everything; very often, teachers are wrong about stuff, too.

A teacher who can stand being corrected is nearly a treasure to be cherished these days.
Some of the teachers I've had have been patently wrong on come counts, blatantly unknowledgeable on others, yet would not accept any kind of correction, criticism or comment.

I got my revenge by getting a high grade and writing a poor evaluation.
Now if only those evaluations really meant something...

Re:Not the worst for *me*...

[HTH NE1]

Effectively passing knowledge on to students in a way that results in them actually learning something is nontrivial. And no one should know that better than programmers. I quote Douglas Adams:

"There really wasn't a lot this machine could do that you couldn't do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble," said Richard, "but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-witted pupil."

Reg looked at him quizzically.

"I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply," he said. "I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I'm sitting."

"I'm sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?"

This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.

Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?"

"It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils," came a low growl from somewhere on the table, "without undergoing a pre-frontal lobotomy."

Re:no, your a wannabe.. who never learned to code

[Curien]

When communicating with other people, what words mean *to you* doesn't count for much. In the context of web content, static means unchanging _from the server's point of view_. Whether the client thinks the content changes or not doesn't matter. Flash is (usually) static content, for example.

WebGUI has some support for dynamic content, but I'm not familiar enough with it to know how much (I'm thinking of the thing where it takes a SQL query and turns it into a table or whatever). But what the guy you were talking to meant, is that if you put a PHP script into the WebGUI edit box and save it, it just spits the PHP back when you request the page (static content) instead of *executing* it (dynamic content).

I'm actually dealing with some pages right now where the content needs to be dynamically generated, but the original author wanted it integrated with WebGUI. So what does he do? He writes a ColdFusion .cfc which responds to AJAX requests, and he loads all of the dynamic data as JSON during onLoad, and then he uses DOM manipulation to add the information to the page. What a MESS!! All because he used a CMS for something it's not meant.

Re:Wow!

[Phantasmagoria]

There are two possible explanations:
(1) Most low-uid people have become lurkers. They read a lot but post little. I know this applies to me.
(2) Nobody really looks at the uid of posters until a uid-war starts, so nobody notices the low-uid people unless there is a uid-war.
I suspect it's actually a combination of the two.

What have I done since I joined slashdot? Changed universities, changed a few jobs, changed a few girlfriends, changed a few psychiatrists, and also changed a few passwords. :-P

Re:Table Layouts are still essential

[Iaughter]

Well, one thing that was correct in the article: tables are still the best way to organise a html page. At least for relatively complex websites. There is absolutely no replacement for tables, when it comes to aligning elements to each other, both horizontally and vertically.

CSS just doesn't cut it for relative positioning to multiple elements in a column. For simple layouts, CSS is great. It works, it looks neat, and is very maintainable. But as soon as you start needing a proper grid style layout, it just falls to pieces. There's no way that CSS can replace tables in that instance, unless you use absolute positioning and meticulously calculate the exact sizes and positions you want. But then you're left with a complete mess, much worse than using tables to begin with.

As long as you keep the table as simple as possible, and use CSS to layout the simple elements, then it's still very maintainable. Just try to avoid using tables for every little thing, and the design is generally fine.

Whoaaaa there. Why is this modded +5 insightful? The parent is completely wrong. Tables are not, at all, the best way to organize an html page. Why? Because that's mixing the appearance of the page with the content of the page. Once this happens, pages have to be individually maintained.

It's true that CSS grids are hard.

This is because they are so much more flexible than html tables for layout.

There are a number of pre-existing, opensource css grid setups available (check out http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/), if you don't want to reinvent the wheel.

Also, one can absolute position columns by percentage of the page, which generally answers parent's fear of layout math.

In general, the attitude of the parent is exactly what web professionals have been fighting for the past ... 6 years or so. It's disheartening to see people on /. agree.