HTML 2.0: Remembering my First Webpage

I was going to talk about HTML 1.0 but then I looked at Wikipedia and learned I never actually wrote a webpage in HTML 1.0, instead my earliest HTML experience was in 2.0, which was released in 1995. That's crazy. 

I read about the WWW obsessively at the time. It was maybe the thing I was most interested in outside of video games. One day, in an issue of MacWorld, or maybe MacUser (my dad subscribed to both) it had a page about how to write a webpage. "Holy crap this is so easy," I said to myself.

The HTML 2.0 spec had less than 100 tags, total. That's a rough estimate based on me being lazy and not wanting to count them all in the old HTML 2.0 specification. That's a project for a different day. The article obviously didn't show them all, just what you needed to get started. Basically header tags and paragraph tags. Maybe it had more, but it was so long ago now. My mind is corrupted with age. 

I initially misunderstood the purpose of the header and paragraph tags. I thought the headers were just for setting text size and the paragraph tag was for paragraph breaks. So whatever dumb thing I made it was in all h6.

In Lynx, the text-only browser in use, it looked fine. When I saw it on Mosaic, the first really popular graphical web browser, it looked like garbage. To be fair most every website in 1995 looked like garbage but mine was particularly horrible.

Imagine visiting a website with pages of text presented like this. This is what my very first foray into webdesign looked like: crap.

And the breaks between paragraphs were horrible, too. Again, looked fine in Lynx, looked wretched in Mosaic.

I also hated the fact there was no way to indent a paragraph. This isn't even something I think anyone does anymore, even in papers, but to me it was completely offensive to not have a spacing at the beginning of a paragraph and like the stubborn stupid idiot I was, I just seethed at this oversight and rejected trying to use the web as serious platform for writing. I just made joke sites with GIFs on them.

In 1996 I bought a book called "Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours" and learned how to actually build HTML 2.0 webpages, but just enough to make some GeoCities-level sites. I wish I'd learned a little more because in 1996 you could charge someone $100,000 to make the crappiest website for their brand and they'd be blown away by your technical acumen, like you were some futuristic tech-wizard.

CSS was introduced in 1996 and I first learned about it in probably 1999 or 2000 in a book I bought about HTML 4.1. Again, I misunderstood how it worked, and tried and failed a million times to implement CSS in my webpages.

The problem was, I was putting stuff in the style tags the same way I'd been putting everything between tags. Literally I would try something like <style>font-color: #00000; font-weight: heavy</style> and then write my text. And it never worked because, obviously!

It was always a barrier to understanding I'd put up in front of myself, I always made things needlessly difficult because I was trained by the education system that shortcuts were bad, completing a job was less important than doing it the "right way," and often the "right way" was an invention of my own mind. Still holds me back.

What I'm getting at here is that in spite of almost 30 years of using HTML, I only just got kind of good at it, and I'd say maybe 99% of that is due to a late-life ADHD diagnoses and a treatment plan. Now I really want to get even better at it. I'll take any recommendations you might have for books (as I'm well aware of the myriad of online resources). I just like a good old-fashioned book.