By Karan Misra
There is no doubt in my mind that for technically-inclined college individuals in the present day and age who envision creating or managing a website, having some level of skill in writing HTML is very important. And I certainly agree with you on the point that very few people who are not already heavily involved in the engineering fields are aware of how HTML works. Therefore, the idea of having a website that offers HTML tutorials and reference is very relevant indeed.
Unfortunately, since your website is currently in its early stages of development, I cannot give a lot of feedback on many of the actually implemented features but give speculative feedback on the plans specified in assignments one, two and three.
Programming Language? First of all, I think it's important to make the distinction between a programming language and a markup language (HTML belongs to the latter category), and although explaining the difference between the two is beyond the scope of my critique, a simple web search revealed a website that succinctly explains the difference. The basic idea is that HTML is a language that specifies how information gets formatted and displayed and is not used for any algorithmic purposes.
Competition: Your website is not the first website that wants to impart the knowledge of HTML to the masses and I daresay it won't be the last. However, this brings up the unanswered question of what will make your website special and why a person would visit your website for reference as opposed to any other. As you mentioned, W3C (the Worldwide Web Consortium) itself provides a basic guide to HTML and there are other HTML references websites such as HTMLHelp.com which I have personally used in the past and find to be rather satisfactory. What will set your site apart from its competitors?
What to Teach: Another important issue that comes up in teaching HTML today, as opposed to ten years ago, is the question of what to teach. Since websites as of 2007 use a variety of technologies besides HTML - CSS, JavaScript and Flash come to mind - and since these technologies are integral components in developing any modern website, how useful would a website be that teaches just HTML? One of the questions that I feel needs to be answered is whether your website intends to guide visitors through building modern websites or just building HTML-only web pages, for I feel there is an important distinction. The former would involve learning, at the least, some helper languages such as CSS while the latter would be learning HTML for the sake of HTML but which would not enable the learner to jump in and start editing a modern website that uses a lot of non-HTML components.
A Model: Any website that claims to teach HTML must also undergo an introspective process by which I mean that it must itself be a good model as to the practices of writing HTML. Therefore, I believe that you will need to take care while building his website to make sure that the HTML he composes to teach HTML is Valid HTML, is easy to read in case a visitor chooses to view its source as a learning aid and also use appropriate HTML conventions such as avoiding inline CSS styles and using a minimum possible number of tags.
Design: Although you referred to a website on your demo website as one using excessive advertising and whose design was thus flawed and how your site would only have ads in certain unobtrusive sections, I am not clear as to whether your website intends to inform the visitor regarding sensible design guidelines while making HTML pages, such as choice of colors, the appropriate way to display navigation bars, etc. In either case, I believe the design of your website could be spruced up a bit in terms of layout, fonts and colors.
Create or Edit? HTML can be learnt from many different perspectives. The two major ones are whether the student wishes to learn HTML in order to write web pages from scratch or to edit existing web pages. Although I feel the latter is more important, the question still remains to be answered whether your website wishes to specialize in one of these two methodologies or tackle both.
Advertising: Finally, for any website that targets a worldwide audience, I believe it is important to think about ways to attract visitors to your website. Do you believe your website automatically pop up as one of the top search results on major search engines on the Internet or do you have some plan to advertise it?
