The Limits

It happened again, last week: Someone asked if they had to "learn it all" or if there weren't some areas they could shortcut and leave to others?

We are kind of lucky, here at UNL, in that there are just so many of us, in many ways. If you don't have the time or the talent for something, there is probably someone, somewhere, who can help to take up the slack.

If you were interested in opening up your own Web design shop, I would say "Yes", you probably should get as deep into every aspect of the business, including Business, as you possibly can. But even there, a lot of people would make the case that you should not probably try to do your own taxes and business accounting. They would advocate leaving that stuff to the professionals. It's a busy world, and keeping up with technology and tax law may be more than most people should try to handle.

Photoshop is a wonderful tool, but it is intimidating, and a great many of the features and tools in Photoshop are difficult to even explain, let alone learning them. And in its way, Photoshop is like Microsoft Word. You get a skillion features and tools, each designed to accommodate professionals working in their particular field. But learning how to set up your page margins and inter-paragraph spacing isn't going to turn you into Stephen King. You still need to bring some talent to bear on the task of editing your graphics or images, to get the most from Adobe Photoshop.

Thankfully, most of our image-editing needs are pretty simple. We resize images, we crop them, maybe we change a color to better match something already on our pages. From time to time you may want to take power lines out of a sky or clean up some RedEye flashbulb issues. That's about it.

But even getting that far in Photoshop requires a bit of time and talent, and someone to explain it in a book, on a Web site or in person. Then, after a little practice, you've got it down.

We deal in HTML, which has not changed appreciably since Bill Clinton was president. Those days are over, and a lot of Web professionals are looking forward to HTML5, now. We will see a continuance of most of what we knew in HTML 4.01 (the paragraph tag isn't about to change) but there will be new ways of doing old things, and there will be new things we can finally do, in HTML5.

Cascading Stylesheets have been around since Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4, but support really wasn't there until Internet Explorer 6. Today we're hearing things about IE9, and how it will make our lives easier. We'll see. Along the way, we have seen support advance as the standards moved from CSS to CSS3 specification. Talk to anyone who did this for a living ten years ago and they will speak with a mixture of both pride and relief that they learned all of the hacks to make CSS work in more than one or two browsers, and they don't have to do this, any more.

Dreamweaver has grown and changed. Dreamweaver 1, 2 and 3 were honestly just cheap ways for me to upgrade my real favorite Web editor, HomeSite. But starting with Dreamweaver MX 2000 the program offered some compelling reasons to learn its new features and workflows and to keep using it through Dreamweaver MX 2004, Dreamweaver 8, Dreamweaver CS3 and CS4. There's no reason to believe they are about to muck it up with Dreamweaver CS5, either.

Still, if you can sketch out a Web design in Photoshop, and you have a lot of Webby friends, there may be little reason for you to ever spend the calories learning HTML and CSS, though doing so would inform many of your design decisions, I'm sure. If you are great at HTML and CSS but do not understand Layers and gradients or why you would use .gif or .jpeg formats or how to switch between the two in Photoshop, you can probably lean on someone who can turn out the work you need in half the time, or less, that it would take you to do it alone.

My dad was always one of those who thought that learning to change your own oil and learning to change your own flat tires would make you a better driver. I am my father's son. I know it will take longer, but I really think you should try to learn it all, and to learn as much as you can about everything, because it all works together, now.