I have a junior colleague who is increasingly required to maintain various
intranet (& internet) pages. He really needs some basic training to get him
started - so far he's just been copying my work and [optimistically] piecing
things together.

His bosses have suggested external training (since I dont have the time) but
I'm loath to let him sign up for some kind of bodge-fest using Frontpage or
Dreamweaver.

Do any of my UK peers have any recommendations for such training? [He's
Yorks-based, so the nearer the better, I would say].

I've tried to point him in the direction of some good online tutorials but
he really needs a good kick-start with some proper training.


Thanks in advance...

CJM

CJM wrote:

The best I've seen is CIW, and this was still so poor that I'm loathe
to recommend it. The others were worse though (OU and local college
being particularly bad)

Training is expensive and still costs time. I'd be inclined to blow
£100+ on the good books and ALLOCATE some time to him to disappear off
into a separate undisturbed office for a week and re-emerge with a real
mini-project developed properly (squeeze the size to get the
techniques and quality up). You'd also need to allocate an hour - hour
and a half of your own time each day for mentoring. This needs to take
place in the spare office too, with no disturbance from your mainstream
workload.

Or tell him to goof off and read Usenet. c.i.w.a.h is still the
highest level public discussion of HTML authoring that I know of.


Who wants a new booklist thread ?

<dingbat@codesmiths.com> wrote in message
news:1143026299.425972.107690@j33g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...
...which is what I feared...

Unfortunately, this guy is more of a do-er than a thinker, hence I want him
to be dragged up to a minimum level before letting him loose. He's keen
enough, just not a natural academic, so until he has some momentum, this
route might be a false economy.

I actually work for his parent company and we're 2hrs away - so this isn't
possible. Which is a shame, because he does respond well to mentoring.

Quite!

In article <48crlkFj22fdU1@individual.net>, CJM
<cjmnews04@REMOVEMEyahoo.co.uk> writes
In that case, you might want to buy him Eric Meyer's two "on CSS" books.
They are designed for do-ers, not thinkers. Each chapter is a mini
project that walks you through the steps required from a basic page to a
finished project. Reading the book in bed is largely a waste of time, it
was designed to be read in front of your computer whilst you play along
and tinker. Sounds like what your chap needs.

--
Alan Silver
(anything added below this line is nothing to do with me)

take a look at http://www.hwg.org/ they have been around since the web
began

<dwight.stegall@gmail.com> kirjoitti
viestissä:1143079937.344924.209610@u72g2000cwu.goo glegroups.com...

Their pages might validate, but stuff like in their HTML

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" width="100%"
summary="Table for layout">

would put ME off from any HTML/CSS training they offer...

"Alan Silver" <alan-silver@nospam.thanx.invalid> wrote in message
news:OOWXTPD8+ZIEFw72@nospamthankyou.spam...
I've actually got 'Eric Meyer on CSS' myself... I might throw it his way
anyway....

In article <dvt4p6$fvb$1@phys-news4.kolumbus.fi>,
Wÿrm <nomailstodragon@north.invalid> wrote:
This as a religious argument that appears here on a weekly basis.

To me, there's little difference between <td> and <div>. Both tags
separate content into blocks. So what? At least the table layout
is compatible with MORE browsers than the CSS layout.

Typically I have a <div> header to my pages, a single two-column
table (for menu and content) and CSS for everything else. To me,
that's a good compromise that preserves the basic layout in all
browsers but still offers the efficiency and flexibility of CSS.

This layout philosophy harms no one, and it's easy for me and others
to maintain and understand.

-A

And lo, axlq didst speak in "bunchagroups":
Sure.

*One* table for layout is a semantic issue only. Use it at your own
discretion; I won't complain. Until a majority of user agents support
display:table-cell; properly, it can sometimes be the only cross-browser
solution.

It's *nested* tables which are the problem. Try it yourself. Nested
tables plus a few careless CSS rules can equal chaos in one user agent
while rendering perfectly fine in another. Such undefined behaviour
should be avoided by *everyone*, not just W3C zealots.

The fact that many WYSIWYG generators use nested tables as a matter of
routine just makes the problem all the more serious.

But just *one* table for layout? I like good semantics so it'd be my last
recourse, but if you have to, you have to.

Grey

--
The technical axiom that nothing is impossible sinisterly implies the
pitfall corollary that nothing is ridiculous.
- http://www.greywyvern.com/orca#search - Orca Search: Full-featured
spider and site-search engine

In article <op.s6vuadb0sl6xfd@news.nas.net>,
GreyWyvern <spam@greywyvern.com> wrote:
Well, if I need one simple 2-column table for layout, and I also
have to display tabular data (rows and columns of numeric data)
within that layout, then nesting tables is unavoidable.

Even without the table layout, nesting tables are sometimes
mandatory, especially for scientific purposes. For example,
consider a periodic table of the chemical elements, with each cell
containing its own table of properties for all known isotopes. In
this case, vertical and horizontal relationships are important at
both levels of nesting, therefore you need nested tables.

A more trivial example would be a calendar showing 12 months in a
3x4 cell table, and each cell contains the calendar for each month
using 6x7 table (6 rows, 7 days per week). Granted, a calendar
has no need to have a horizontical-vertical relationship between
individual months, but for some purposes (horoscopes? relationship
with constellations in the sky?) it may.

CSS should be used only where it's not important to preserve
horizontal and vertical relationships between displayed elements.

That's why I test my stuff in as many browsers as I can get my
hands on. Whatever doesn't work gets added to my "don't do this"
list. Overlap regions in IE is one example -- perhaps it won't work
correctly for because I'm trying it inside a table cell? Oh well,
out it goes.

As I said, I see little semantic difference between <td> and <div> to
delineate logical blocks.

-A