I find myself doing work I was never officially trained for. Even if I had been, with changing standards and growing technological capabilities I would have to continue learning throughout my career. As a result I read a lot online (and in books, though less so for computing topics than design and business) and treasure the truly good resources that I sift out from the hundreds or thousands of tutorials and code snippets online.
I had an advantage with HTML in that I started using it in the late 90s, when expectations for how websites looked were not terribly high. I’ve been able to grow with it since then and tack on CSS (albeit a good while after it became available). If I had to start from scratch today my first stop would probably be Codecademy, because it’s interactive. Skilled Up has a list of free beginner HTML tutorials that has several sites I’m already familiar with and approve of, as well as a smaller list of CSS tutorials. After that, well, nowadays I do mostly searches for specific topics. I learn best when I immediately use the information for my own purposes, and I’m also generally not starting completely from scratch. However, I’ll highlight CSS-Tricks, which in addition to the blog has forums and a directory of code snippets for HTML, CSS, and five other languages or libraries that are relevant to my interests. I’m spending too much learning time on my own development challenges to read much on other peoples’, but between my CSS being stronger than a lot of my other skills and CSS-Tricks posts being written so that I can get something out of them even if the situation is completely irrelevant to me at the moment, CSS-Tricks is the one non-WordPress blog in my short list of development blogs (the fact that it is also WordPress-oriented doesn’t hurt). It just about rises to the level of “reference.”
On that note, for HTML and CSS reference, my current go to is the Mozilla Developer Network. They also have a directory of tutorials, some theirs, some elsewhere. I’ve also started diving into the web standards, sometimes to fill in picky details and sometimes to compare HTML5 and CSS3 with their predecessors to answer browser support questions. A few specific links: HTML 5.1, HTML 4.01, CSS3 media queries, CSS3 selectors, CSS 2.1.
The specifications themselves actually point to Web Platform Docs, a wiki for developer documentation that is still coming together. A quick look through the CSS materials, though, has led me to put this site second on my list of references already.
Look for more posts on self-education from time to time. I hope they will be useful.
Studious cactus from klimkin on Pixabay.