Call me crazy, but one of the reasons I got into web design is because I really wanted to learn the markup coding languages (like HTML, XHTML, XML, etc) and I truly and honestly get excited learning things of this nature. Of course, I still want to learn the artistic design side of it and am just excited about that, hence my enrollment into an art related college. But I can tell by reading the articles I researched and watching the one video I found, a newfound interest and curiosity has sparked up in me again. This is kind of what I was waiting for and look forward to other classes covering this kind of material. I remember one programming class I took in high school and just absolutely loving it. It was fun to me, especially when so many others were almost brought to tears in trying to understand it. I’m hoping that same passion will surface with these new web-based languages I’ll be learning. Pretty sure, it will.
Learning things from how the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is dedicated from “leading the Web to its full potential” and how they have come up with standards (or recommendations as they really should be called since they are not enforced by some global law) for the web design community developing “open specifications (de facto standards) to enhance the interoperability of Web-related products’. There’s also the “European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) which is an organization officially founded in 1961 in order to meet the need for standardizing computer operational formats, including programming languages and input/output codes”. “The main role of the ECMA is to develop Standards and Technical Reports in the area of information and communication technology.” Basically, they have a set of web design standards that, if you abide to in your web design coding, will enable your website to viewed in most web browsers, whether they be old or new. Granted, your website may load in a view as simple as straight text and nothing else, but the more important point is that your website page will still load and the content can be viewed. As one of the articles said “complying with Web standards can give your Web pages greater visibility in Web searches. The structural information present in compliant documents makes it easy for search engines to access and evaluate the information in those documents, and they get indexed more accurately.” Your website will be more accessible and also account for more stability.
I also interestingly read and learned about semantically correct code, and how web designers who follow this practice “use heading elements (<h1> – <h6>) for different types of headings, paragraph elements (<p>) for paragraphs of texts, and lists (<ul>, <ol> etc) for any kind of listing you might have, and so on.” It’ll make certain parts of your website each to find when troubleshooting any errors in coding, decrease your load time because there’s less code, and “strongly improve maintenance aspects of your web site”.
The importance of “separation of Content (HTML/XHTML), Presentation (CSS) And Interaction (JavaScript)” could not be stressed enough, and it makes perfect sense to me in terms of having order and a structure to things, especially when writing code. I love order and structure to things. One of the main reasons I loved math so much in school. Still do. Anyways, keeping things like the CSS and JavaScript files separate will help in performance because these files are cached “in the end user’s web browser after the first load, hence dramatically decreasing load times and improving the experience”. Also, keeping all three of these separate helps you know where to look when troubleshooting as each layer has its own purpose. In terms of maintenance, “you have all the code in one central location, applying all presentation and interaction code to all the web pages within a website”.
So I could go on and on. Obviously, I find this stuff interesting and am excited about learning from in future classes. I love the whole “behind the scenes” sort of vibe you get from learning this stuff. It’ll be fun one day to actually be able to make sense of all the web associated coding I’ve seen over the years and finally be able to understand what it all means and actually does.
http://archive.webstandards.org/edu_faq.html
Phbalanced808's Blog 
I felt the exact same way in high school. When we studied Web Standards is was like a secret language only I understood. Your enthusiasm encourages me to try my best at understanding web design. Your links were useful and very indebted.
Thanks for the kind comments on my blog. I know what you mean about finally getting to learn some code. I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for 1.5 quarters here waiting for the moment someone finally said, “We’re going to start coding now.” I never got to take any HTML in high school. They didn’t introduce that into our curriculum until the year AFTER I finished my computer requirements. Being a small school, that meant taking the only computer course we offered. I had to learn what little I know from customizing my myspace or livejournal layouts when I had them. I’m excited about this as well.