[thelist] Re: authority for the Web!

[Techwatcher]

Even though we are self-taught, we can have the very best training
anyone out there offers -- and for free! No book can do as good a job
as the World Wide Web consortium, and every book is slightly out of
date by the time traditional publishers release it, anyway. Take a look
at their site and various hangers-around (such as the training site, I
think linked directly to them):

http://www.w3.org  (btw, used to be wc3.org, I think)

Remember the Web (capital letter because it's one specific entity) was
actually invented by one man, Tim Berners-Lee, and he works for the w3c
now. You can hugely improve your understanding of Web design by reading
even a little bit of the various technical papers available there. You
get a sense of what they are trying to accomplish, and how they are
likely to try to get there -- i.e., the Web is a channel, and the
content is meant to remain pure, with format and content entirely
separable.

Us content-writers (I'm really a writer) are not to be bogged down with
the presentation aspects. That's their goal, and although I was a
documentation consultant for decades, and formatting is both important
to me and a skill I spent plenty of time developing, I applaud it.

Cheers --
Carol Stein
techwatcher at accesswriters.com