Yet again my concern for the value of an Internet Computer Science degree from UWA is raised, as a dippy co-worker with two years of such a degree behind her asks me for help:
“Dan,” she begins, “How do I make a table in PHP?”
For those of you that don’t know quite as much about web design as she should, PHP is a programming language used, amongst other things, for developing dynamic, flexible web sites which integrate with other data sources. This weblog, for example, is powered by PHP. It is most frequently used to output HTML, the language of the web.
“I think you mean HTML,” I reply, seeing what she’s trying to achieve – the alignment of two text fields with their corresponding labels. She’ll need a simple two-by-two table. The code for this is as follows:
<table>
<tr>
<td>
Top-Left Text
</td>
<td>
Top-Right Text
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
Bottom-Left Text
</td>
<td>
Bottom-Right Text
</td>
</tr>
</table>
What are they teaching them these days? I remember learning this at about age 14, using Netscape’s examples. This girl has been studying Internet-fucking-Computing at degree level for two years and hasn’t been shown this?
Don’t even get me started on the fact that she shouldn’t be using a table for the purpose she was trying to use it for.
Update 2023-12-07: In hindsight, I made a knee-jerk reaction in writing this blog post. I should have treated this junior developer as what I’d now call “one of the lucky 10,000” and been more-supportive and a better teacher. We’re all learning, and back in 2004 I clearly had a lot of learning still to do.
*sound of me hitting my desk repeatedly with my head*
Just tell me she wasn’t using it for layout… please
Using if for layout? Absolutely.
As opposed to using it for tabular data I mean…
B
Yes. I know. That’s what I was responding to. I was saying that yes, absolutely, she is using it for layout, which is what you were asking…
“What are they teaching them these days?”
Excellent question… this lot were trying to dynamically resize iframes (categorically against HTML spec, works in a couple of versions of IE if the moon is full and the wind’s in the right direction.) Much browbeating later…