…is hard.

A major project I’m doing right now at work involves teaching HTML/CSS and (and probably Javascript) to an audience of mixed knowledge-levels.

Now, I’ve got a lot of experience explaining things in context and answering questions for people of different levels of computer literacy. And I used to tutor students in Math, Science, English and other languages, and I taught Art privately for awhile. So no problem, right?

Trying to condense an entire introductory class into a couple hours and make it both appropriate AND useful to all different skill levels and then use it to contrast against the html/css/javascript being written by a tool provided by a vendor? Ouch.

I’m thinking that it might be best approached as exactly what it is: a foreign language. It has its own alphabet. Its words are elements, and it most definitely has its own rules of grammar. The doctype tells a browser what dialect you’re speaking in (html and xhtml are about as different as American and Britsh English, for instance).