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Opera recently released a set of suc­cinct edu­ca­tional arti­cles on the foun­da­tion of the web, stan­dard tech­nolo­gies and well-​written intro­duc­tions to vital web design topics, aptly titled the Opera Web Stan­dards Cur­ricu­lum (WSC).

At first I asked myself why some­thing like this was nec­es­sary in the year of 2008—don’t stu­dents get taught web stan­dards through college and uni­veristy these days? If not, aren’t there already are number of good resources avail­able, free and com­mer­i­cal? I had a bit of a read, start­ing right at the begin­ning and found par­tially the answer in the fifth article:

“…The general feeling I get from looking at numer­ous uni­ver­sity courses is that web lan­guages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript are below the tech­ni­cal thresh­old of most com­puter science pro­grams, and above the tech­ni­cal thresh­old of most MIS/New Media pro­grams.

What I’m getting at here is that many edu­ca­tional courses don’t cover this kind of stuff in any great level of detail. I would be willing to wager that if you ask 10 devel­op­ers that work with web stan­dards where they learned how to use web stan­dards that 9 of them would reply that they are self-​taught (the other 1 won’t answer you because she’s too busy trying to get her site to render prop­erly in IE6).”

Pre­vi­ously defined acronyms earlier in the quoted text have been rede­fined.

I started an IT course in college that focused on pub­lish­ing content onto web-​based mediums in early 2006. I was told we would not touch CSS until the end of the second year, and mention of web stan­dards was not to found in the entire cur­ricu­lum doc­u­ment. I promptly left the course. As Jonathan Lane points out, most standards-​based web design­ers and devel­op­ers are prob­a­bly self-taught—I am.

But why another set of arti­cles ontop of the many resources that already exist? Because com­monly it’s scat­tered across the Inter­net or because you’d need to pur­chase books (and in the case of stu­dents, those uni­ver­sity text books can be quite pricey). The neat thing about web design and devel­ope­ment is that arti­cles like those from the WSC appear in the same canvas we work on and con­se­quently offer inter­ac­tive examples—and best of all are freely acces­si­ble. Books can be nice—particularly well set ones—but for someone just start­ing with web stan­dards begin­ning with the WSC marks a good begin­ning.

The WSC doesn’t go into great tech­ni­cal detail. Instead, it offers the back­ground infor­ma­tion that is often omitted from the more tech­ni­cal arti­cles on devel­oper blogs or on related pub­li­ca­tions. Some­thing like this would have been great in place of the IT course I entered a few years ago.

Apart from being an intro­duc­tion to the cre­ation of the Inter­net, how it came to be what it is now and why stan­dards are good for every­one, the WSC also fea­tures intro­duc­tory arti­cles on infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, accessibility, usabil­ity and content context, colour theory, wire­fram­ing, assorted mockup tips and last (and best of all), an article on web typog­ra­phy.

The Opera WSC will prob­a­bly be my future rec­om­men­da­tion for new­com­ers to web stan­dards, HTML, and the selected arti­cles above. I would even rec­om­mend them to the experts—pick a topic you haven’t dealt with in a while and make sure you’re up to scratch (there are a few ques­tions at the end of each article).

Kudos to Opera.