It was most defiantly a "blast from the past" moment today in my A level I.T class for the coursework Task 2 of 4 is to create a website for a company called DM Carpets (It's all part of the specification, it's not a real organisation) but task two is to create a website with specific pages and specific content but of course the layout is up to you, which is great as Website Development might as well be my middle name. Today was mainly about the theory of it all and I don't want to sound big headed here but I knew it already, but I have been in the website development scene for a few years so it's nothing new to me.

For the task itself we're using a great piece of website development software called Dreamweaver, and this is literally the mother of all website development software, it's powerful, easy to use and offers the WYSIWYG factor (What you see is what you get) with is ability to offer designer view as well as code view it's a very powerful program and my college is fortunate to be able to offer this software to it's students, but it's often mis-treated, and by that I mean not used to it's full potenial.

For anyone in the website development scene and knows a bit about something called validation, you'll agree with me when I say that using tables to creating a website is the most horrific sight you could lay your pretty website development eyes on, but from the looks of the hand out sheet, thats how we're going to be creating the website for task 2, defiantly not me, im going to be coding a XHTML and CSS valid website. Although many people in my class may not know about Validation and stuff I really wish schools would teach basic HTML and CSS to students, even basic knowledge is better than tables

But I guess the whole tables scene sent me back to when I first started out in the whole website development sector, and I was using very invalid ways of coding websites e.g. tables but also something called frames which are worse if not even more worse. To show you Im going to shame myself by showing you some examples:

A website using tables:

<table width="1000" border="1" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="10">
  <tr>
    <th colspan="3" scope="col">HEADER</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <th scope="row">Navigation</th>
    <td colspan="2" rowspan="2">This is a content area that may have been used on a website using tables way back in the 1990's quite scary really. </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <th scope="row">Link 1 </th></tr>
    <tr>
	<th scope="row">Link 2 </th>
	</tr>
</table>

Tables now, are very much retired as being used in layouts, but aren't invalid in terms of content. Tables can be used in such methods as producing data.

A website using frames:

<frameset rows="80,*" cols="*" frameborder="no" border="0" framespacing="0">
  <frame src="frame-top.html" name="topFrame" scrolling="No" noresize="noresize" id="topFrame" title="topFrame" />
  <frameset cols="80,*" frameborder="no" border="0" framespacing="0">
    <frame src="frame-left.html" name="leftFrame" scrolling="No" noresize="noresize" id="leftFrame" title="leftFrame" />
    <frame src="frame-body.html" name="mainFrame" id="mainFrame" title="mainFrame" />
  </frameset>
</frameset>

3 seperate documents in one page to create the web layout, it's really not practical is it? But before CSS this is what website could of been formed off.

I didn't really need to show you that but for someone who's interested in the evolution of website development, this was a small part of it. It's mainly a insight on what websites we're like before CSS, I mean when I started out in coding websites CSS was around but I just wasn't aware of existance, which is also the common reason for many invalid websites around on the internet.

Got a interesting website development story to share? Why not post a comment below and tell the rest of the world about it!