I've been writing HTML/XHTML for the last decade or so, since a college internship. I taught myself the basics back in the mid-90's with the help or a friend and one of those "Learn HTML in 24 hours" books. It probably was something more like 10 hours before I really felt like I "knew some HTML". And the idea of making a website that anyone in the world could visit was fascinating to me being a journalism major at the time. Cutting out the middleman and becoming your own publisher was pretty spectacular to me.

I've literally been feeding myself on the proceeds of my markup ever since.

The coolest part about this is that despite spending so much time mastering web development skills, there's always something new to learn, a new approach to take or a better way to build your site. First it was Photoshop. Then it was JavaScript and CSS. And despite no real training in programming, and not really having the brain of a programmer, I learned some PHP. Then I took on ASP and ColdFusion. I was into Flash for about a year or so. Then back into CSS. Then I took up interest in accessibility. And before I knew it, I had to learn C#/.Net, and in the process, joined it with Web Standards to take my skills to the next level.

But after doing a code review today on a standards-based client site today, I realized just how satisfying it is to know that I've poured the last decade of learning into the templates I've just produced. I think that's pretty cool. Sometimes I have to remind myself that just because I read blogs of developers who really are professional site builders like myself, the fact of the matter is that it's still a rare breed of website developers who've been in the game this long and who are actually using web standards.

Labels: CSS, Flash, web-standards, XHTML