Slightly ajar

Here at Opera we take web standards very seriously. As part of the work we are doing to advance the state of standards adoption on the Web, we’ve just released the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. With support of some major names in the standards scene, we hope the articles will be adopted both by education institutes and self learners alike, so that up to date techniques are taught instead of out-dated practices such as table based layouts and browser sniffing.

The release is the culmination of a long process that started around June 2006. We were contacted by Karl Dubost of the W3C, about the education outreach they were hoping to do, and if Opera could help them. Education is something I believe strongly in (I do have two degrees after all), and really wanted to help. I remember in my Computer Science course, we touched on the Web and were basically left to our own devices to learn web technologies—after all, they are easy right, and not like real programming languages like C that were taught to us by the lecturers. Any output in HTML that was demonstrated would be just slapped into a table, as the Web part wasn't the part of interest. Due to this approach, students would just lean bad practices from the top hits on Google when searching for material.

I wanted to make a web standards pack that could be given to universities, or downloaded, so that lecturers could give them to students as reference material for self learning when they had to use web technologies, or to be included in lessons when the course was web development related. Sadly this didn't come to anything as the developer relations team (or the precursor to it) at that time was just myself, and I didn't have the bandwidth to undertake this and the huge amount of work it entails.

Meanwhile Chris Mills was still a friend of Ed, and was independently fostering plans of his own to make a beginners web development course. For whatever reason, that never happened, but we stole him away from Ed, and joined our team. Chris brought up this plan, and we were of course very enthusiastic about it, and went through a plan of what should be included in the course. Since planting those seeds, Chris has been slaving away at gathering authors, getting articles written and editing them for publication. He’s done a fantastic job at this, and it was great to see something like this unfold without having to do much myself except bug Chris with a few suggestions . Maybe I should ask Chris if there are any spare topics to talk about later in the series. That reminds me I should get back to writting the SVG Primer article that I promised and half wrote…

Now that the first set of articles are out, I urge anyone that has an interest in learning web design to head over to the Opera Web Standards Curriculum page and check it out. If you have any feedback then let us know on the Dev Opera forums.