> GUI tools. There was Frontpage and HoTMetaL and some others. These were actually pretty decent because there wasn't so much you could do with HTML. You could drag'n'drop your content, then clean up manually if you wanted.
This really helped me power up my HTML skills. I initially hosted my site on Geocities, and later my university's home directory based hosting. I first created documents by hand using a basic text editor for Macintosh (often: view source on another site to copy something nice over), but I later found GUI tools like Frontpage with some basic templating features built in.
Once I figured out what the GUI tools were doing, I could more easily understand how to create documents manually or - eventually - generate them dynamically from perl cgi.
It's easy to look to the past with rose colored glasses, and while the technologies then were much simpler, they were also terribly hard to discover and much more limited. I certainly don't think my path to learning web development (at the time I would have said: learning how to be a webmaster) was straightforward!
This really helped me power up my HTML skills. I initially hosted my site on Geocities, and later my university's home directory based hosting. I first created documents by hand using a basic text editor for Macintosh (often: view source on another site to copy something nice over), but I later found GUI tools like Frontpage with some basic templating features built in.
Once I figured out what the GUI tools were doing, I could more easily understand how to create documents manually or - eventually - generate them dynamically from perl cgi.
It's easy to look to the past with rose colored glasses, and while the technologies then were much simpler, they were also terribly hard to discover and much more limited. I certainly don't think my path to learning web development (at the time I would have said: learning how to be a webmaster) was straightforward!