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Saturday 12 July 2008

Web Standards Curriculum at Opera: A+

Just read Chris Mills’ opening words in his introduction to the newly launched Web Standards Curriculum at Opera and you’ll immediately know that this is material brought to us with great passion as well as experience.

Reading through what’s currently available (mostly “standards” philosophy and HTML so far) has been pretty amazing. The content has been organized by Mills, but authored by a variety of very strong and experienced real-world developers including Mark Norman Francis, Christian Heilmann, Linda Goin and Paul Haine.

The impressive aspect of the curriculum as it is now is that it’s comprehensive, including foundational topics such as Internet and Web history and evolution. Educators understand that history provides context for real learning. Sadly, this is an area often not available in books and online tutorials because readers typically want to dive right in and learn a given technique.

I’ve long held as a core belief that proper education includes those details. What good is a technique without context?

I applaud Opera Software, and Chris Mills, and all who are working so hard to create a really well-organized, well-crafted and completely free series addressing both the conceptual and pragmatic.

Well done, my Operatic friends! You get an A+.

Filed under:   general
Posted by:   Molly | 01:31 | Comments (10)

Comments (10)

  1. Pingback: Opera teaches good web design with its Web Standards Curriculum | Wisdump

  2. Ton v. Lankveld says Monday 14 July 2008 at 08:48

    At this time I read about half of the current articles, 13 of the 21.
    It will take an other 37 articles for the final verdict, but until now it looks good.

    The history is important.
    It helps to understand why something happens. The historical context.

    Now I have to find some-one who will translate it to Dutch. 🙂

  3. Todd H says Saturday 19 July 2008 at 11:07

    Internet and Web History I’ve always felt is important. The latest issue of Vanity Fair has an article called “The Oral History of the Internet” and is pretty good. It’s pretty difficult to condense the entire history of the Internet in one article, but they did a good job.

    Many years ago, I dated a woman who rented a room in Larry Roberts’ house. Larry, being one of the “fathers of the Internet” is featured prominently on the first page of the article. I have often thought of all the questions I could have asked him if I’d known more about his involvement with the Arpanet back when I was dating that woman.

  4. JOYourSelf says Tuesday 22 July 2008 at 15:44

    Great project, I was looking for something last year.
    I’ll try to help on the translation to romanian.
    Are there plans to do an onganized translation team?

  5. Jonathas Scott says Monday 28 July 2008 at 19:30

    Really amazing thing. As JOY said, if a translation team will be formed, I would like to help it translating to portuguese(brazil).

    the only sad thing i would say is that they don’t came with a RSS link for it. how come?

    by the way ! I’m not a regular reader, but follow you a bit from 2004-till now. 🙂 tx for your posts.

  6. Chris Mills says Thursday 21 August 2008 at 10:58

    Hi there folks,

    If anyone is interested in taking part in translation activities, mail me at cmills [at] opera [dot] com

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