I guess the point of this post is to point out the fact that while yes, Web 2.0 makes technology within reach of more people, let’s not completely ignore the underlying basics that many people do not bother to learn, especially when it comes to teaching kids about technology.

What about people who write programs for Web 2.0; the creators of Web 2.0 software? Obviously there is a tremendous amount of brainstorming, troubleshooting and programming involved in making [a] Web 2.0 project/software.

The whole idea of Web 2.0 is to make things simpler, and to allow people to do more with less knowledge. It is my belief that Web 2.0 was designed less for programmers and more for .. well, blogger-types.

Nick

I constantly bump into folks who are pretty switched on to Web 2, but still think in very pre web ways… witness the person who wants to lay photos out in a blog the same way they would have laid them out in a Word doc. The fact is that HTML has a few quirly behaviours that are “just the way it works”, and once you know what those ways are and are willing to work with them rather than against them, life just gets so much easier.

I recently commented to someone that I wish people had a basic grasp of HTML so they could take full advantage of the Editor tools in Moodle… there are all these little buttons for adding images, aligning them to the left or right, linking to urls, etc… these little tools seem to me to be so much easier to use if you have a basic understanding of what the HTML code is about. Try explaining to someone what Right Align does, and you keep finding yourself needing to go back to first principles.

I watched someone insert a 80% wide horizontal rule recently, then use the WYSIWYG editor to drag it wider… it then became a fixed pixel width and suddenly all his pages needed sideways scrolling. He had no idea how or why it was happening, but it bugged him no end! A little bit of basic understanding about HTML would have solved it, not to mention that the problem had to be then fixed by editing the code. There are lots of times when the simplest way to fix a layout problem is to edit the raw source code…

I’m with you Bill, I think a little bit of basic HTML knowledge is a useful thing to have under your belt.