Well, not really. It's well known that the OED does not reflect common usage in this area. -ize is listed first even though most people writing British English use -ise these days. -ize is a valid variant (and is seen often in print, although it often strikes people as an Americanism) but has been in decline over the years at the expense of -ise. The OED is being conservative on this point. It's only to be expected that British and American orthography will diverge over time.
I tend to think the aversion to BASIC in all its evil forms is entirely justified. I started with BBC Basic at about the age of five. Programming for me is an interest that's come and gone over the years, but sadly QBasic is still probably what I'm most familiar with. The problem I found when trying to learn C a few years ago, and again now I'm getting back into coding and making an effort to get beyond the hello world stuff and master Python, is that my mind is severely corrupted by thoughts of GOTO and shocking spaggheti code I can understand as I write, but don't have a hope of untangling if I come back to it later or if I was to try and explain it to anyone else.
"Teaching BASIC should be a criminal offense." -- Edsger Dijkstra
Wise words from Dijkstra. It does take quite some effort to get beyond the bad habits of BASIC.
The web developer toolbar is certainly indispensable for anyone building a website (I've found it very useful for this anyway), but I'd also really recommend it to anyone who is just a reader. People who say it's pointless swapping tables for divs that do the same job fail to recognise that I as a reader might want to change the way the page I'm looking at appears, and this is the way it should always be. I often use a key combination implemented by the web developer toolbar to kill CSS completely so that I'm left (provided the site has been designed with semantic markup) with a simple browser-default style of the kind you might see on a page with no styling at all. If a navigation menu at the side is too wide or the designer has used a stupid font or colours I can kill CSS and get a nice linear layout. If tables are used I can't do this. Most web developers fail to understand that HTML is not a painting language, and that it's not their place to tell me how their site must be displayed when I read it. As far as style is concerned they are entitled only to offer a recommendation in the form of a stylesheet I should be able to turn off to give me a clean unstyled page. After content, I would say graceful degradation, standards compliance, and relative instead of absolute sizing are the most important things to focus on, before worrying about precisely how your elaborate stylesheets look if you're going for an advanced style. Get the basics right first, then start worrying about columns and floats once you've already got a clean viewable website.
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Well, not really. It's well known that the OED does not reflect common usage in this area. -ize is listed first even though most people writing British English use -ise these days. -ize is a valid variant (and is seen often in print, although it often strikes people as an Americanism) but has been in decline over the years at the expense of -ise. The OED is being conservative on this point. It's only to be expected that British and American orthography will diverge over time.
The web developer toolbar is certainly indispensable for anyone building a website (I've found it very useful for this anyway), but I'd also really recommend it to anyone who is just a reader. People who say it's pointless swapping tables for divs that do the same job fail to recognise that I as a reader might want to change the way the page I'm looking at appears, and this is the way it should always be. I often use a key combination implemented by the web developer toolbar to kill CSS completely so that I'm left (provided the site has been designed with semantic markup) with a simple browser-default style of the kind you might see on a page with no styling at all. If a navigation menu at the side is too wide or the designer has used a stupid font or colours I can kill CSS and get a nice linear layout. If tables are used I can't do this. Most web developers fail to understand that HTML is not a painting language, and that it's not their place to tell me how their site must be displayed when I read it. As far as style is concerned they are entitled only to offer a recommendation in the form of a stylesheet I should be able to turn off to give me a clean unstyled page. After content, I would say graceful degradation, standards compliance, and relative instead of absolute sizing are the most important things to focus on, before worrying about precisely how your elaborate stylesheets look if you're going for an advanced style. Get the basics right first, then start worrying about columns and floats once you've already got a clean viewable website.