Happy New Year!

I wish I had learned more, in 2007. I had the best of intentions when the year began, and I have learned quite a lot. But there is always more to know, and more importantly, more to use, to actually put into practice. I feel confident I know the basics pretty well, by now. That <p> tag hasn't changed in more than a dozen years and I have every confidence that if you need a paragraph, I'm your boy. But there is much that changes every few years, or even every few months. And it's going to be like this for our lifetimes, I fear. We are still in the caveman-and-fire stage of Web development. They tell first-year medical students that much of what they are about to learn, much of what they have to learn, will be obsolete by the time they graduate and that must be true for us, too.

There is a core of Web knowledge that does not change. Or, more properly, there is a core of knowledge that hasn't changed yet. But most of what is left seems to have a shelf life of about three years, maybe four. When you first embark upon this journey, it can be like drinking from a fire hose, there is so much to learn. But you quickly come to understand that some fraction of the whole doesn't change at all. And some fraction changes only rarely, and only slightly. Some part changes regularly, but predictably, and then you get into the part that is different in random meaningful ways every few years.

We have only been doing this since the middle 1990s, but we have already seen a few false-starts, a few transient technologies. You might stumble upon a Web page built with Frames. Frames were inflicted upon us at the beginning of the dot-com boom, and for a while we feared that this might one day be how all web pages were built. But Frames quickly showed themselves to be the second-best way to do just about everything, and have fallen from favor. But they were kind of slick if you could get them to work correctly in at least one of the popular browsers of the day. Today, we have other technology to let us do Frame-y things without the Frame-y drawbacks, so Frames are on their way to joining the lexicon of Web Latin.

This is the way of technology. There was a time in this country when you could not sell a modem if it did not say "Hayes Compatible" somewhere on the box. Even long after Hayes went out of business, the surviving modem companies still put that on the box somewhere, so people could be confident in their purchases. Today, of course, it's hard to sell any modem, in a world of cheap broadband connections. So everything has a shelf life, it seems.

One advantage we have over so many other areas of technology is that HTML evolves very slowly, now. For years, we were told that HTML 4.01 was in fact going to be the last version of HTML. Any further development would be on XML and XHTML, the conventional wisdom went. Now there are once again rumblings of an HTML 5, but we are probably in no danger of its adoption before we pay off our next new car. So while there are new versions of the Microsoft Office suite every few years, and new versions of Windows, we can concentrate on HTML and how best to use it.

I don’t know if there is any rule of thumb for keeping up with everything. I would hate to spend much of my time learning things that are definitely going to become obsolete. We know that the guys who wrote Dreamweaver CS3 all still have jobs. There will be a Dreamweaver CS4 one day, or Dreamweaver 10, or Dreamweaver MX2012 or whatever they call it, then. Most of the program won't change, much. But there will be changes, you can be sure. Some may even be improvements. And then that part of the equation will be locked-down for three or four years and we can focus on learning other things.

In the year ahead, I need to learn a lot more about PHP and MySQL. I would benefit a lot from extending the limits of my Dreamweaver knowledge. I thought I'd dodged a bullet by not "wasting" my time learning JavaScript years ago, but new ways of using JavaScript have given it a new lease on life and we may soon be featuring AJAX, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, on many of our pages.

One way or another, I have resolved to spend at least a few minutes every day face-down in a book or two in the year ahead. This time next year, I hope to be much more comfortable with both PHP and MySQL. And maybe it wouldn't hurt to review the CS3 release of Dreamweaver and a little HTML, too.

I wish I had learned more, in 2007. I resolve to redouble my efforts in 2008. If I learn only one new thing a week, then this time next year I’ll know another fifty things. That’s not asking too much, is it?