After not seeing my family for quite some time, due to my hermitting for knowledge, purpose and achievement phase which lasted for about 2 years, we had a chance to catch up and teach each other a thing or two...

After much pleading from my bright and quickly bored nephew, we sat down to learn the basics of building a Web page (I created his site and he made his own through a builder but wanted to know *more* so he could get the page to do what he wants it to do *grin*).

As I thought of how to present this type of information to a 9 year old, the following dawned on me:

doctype is similar to a dialect

(x)html is similar to a language a person might speak

head is the head of a person -- pretty straight forward

body is the body of a person -- pretty straight forward

p, br, table, tr, td, ul, ol and other structural tags are similar to the insides of a body: heart, lungs, intestines, ribs, skeleton, etc.

Attributes are the size, volume, width, height, etc.. of the insides/organs (what a structural tag might look like)

Content is similar to blood, nerve endings, and what's inside/organs. In other words, content goes between the body tags!

CSS is the outside presentation of the person... their clothing, hair colour, shape of their body, etc. etc.

But it doesn't stop there...

The Web is the equivalent to the off-line worldA Web page is a person with all their nuances and brain matterMeta Tag Keywords are synonymous to personality traits of a person (or Web page)Meta Tag Description is a one or two sentence summation of what a person is all about - their mission, so-to-speak!A person can speak more than one language which means a Web page can contain more than one language.Browsers are interpreters but not all interpreters understand all dialects (doctype) - especially if the browser doesn't know which dialect the speaker is speaking, speak all languages (ie. XML, javascript, flash) or accept all cultures (CSS) in all their glory.

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At the end he was eager to learn more and very excited about the prospect of building his own Web page from scratch instead of via a wysiwyg editor. In fact, he stayed up much past his bedtime (unusual) just to keep learning. I was impressed that he remembered all the parts of a Web page by technical name by the end of our "lesson".

So I volunteered to meet with him at least twice a month to hold a "computer summer camp" with him. :-)

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My friend says, "It takes a mad person to come up with so many ideas." I'm happily cool with someone calling me mad! :-)

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