I took 9 years of French which I haven't had a chance to really use since I've never been to a French speaking country and ended up dating someone born to native Spanish speakers for a long period of time. I should have gone to France when I was living in Ireland but since I thought I was going to work there indefinitely I thought I had time. My French knowledge has made it easier to begin learning Spanish and Italian due to similar word roots. Though Spanish with a French Accent coming from an American probably comes across pretty bizarre. Last time someone spoke French to me I started my sentence "Si..." The language wires in my brain are rather tangled at the moment.

So what better to take on than languages even more foreign to me? I speak of html, css, php and javascript. Do French coders need to learn the English in code such as <div style="width:200px; height:100px; border:1px solid blue;"> or can width, etc. be written in French?

CSS is getting easier for me: last night I was cleaning up my CSS files, swapping rules from internal to external stylesheets with considerable ease. At least relative to the difficulty I was having a few weeks ago. Definitely not my native language or even useful as a native language. I'm trying to imagine how I'd ask for help in a department store using CSS. Imagine I'm looking for a new skirt.

#skirt {
background-image:
url('paisley.jpg')
position: absolute
knee: -200px
}
...then I'd need to click "preview in dressing room."

Here's more documentation of my developing code obsession. Last night I told Richard I was 33% thankful when he threw me 3 towels when I only needed one. It would have been 300% thankful if I didn't have to refold the other two. 

Just completed my first web design class on Wednesday. That very morning I received an e-newsletter from GDUSA with web design stats. Excerpt below.

73 PERCENT INVOLVED IN WEB DESIGN

In 2007, a record 73 percent of GDUSA readers tell us they are involved in Web Design or maintenance projects. The previous high response, in other surveys not dedicated to web design per se, was 62 percent. This places Web Design squarely in second place in terms of the kinds of projects that graphic design professionals have worked on in the past year, behind the perennial leader Print & Collateral and ahead of such traditional and important staples as POP & Sign Design and Package Design.

Sure am glad I took that class. We started writing html to build sites and preceded to learn dreamweaver, happy that we started with html so that we could edit the code. In the fall I will be taking either web design II or flash animation. I work at a newspaper which of course publishes online as well. The growth on the online material has increased the demand for flash ads and I had volunteered to learn flash to backup our flash designer. It's obvious to me that my web  skills must be developed since the print only designer seems to be a dying breed. I've worked through several of the flash tutorials and harassed our primary flash designer with many questions. In turn I've been working on specs and simple ads culminating in being the primary flash designer this week while he is vacationing in Montana. It's going quite well. I understand the basic capabilities of the program - it's finding the time in addition to my regular print workload that's been the hardest. Now I have no choice! It's been challenging to think in terms of movement and my eyes have become much more attuned to opening titles of various movies and tv shows in addition to online ads. "Stranger than Fiction" really impressed me.  I like Ugly Betty's opening title too. Revising the timing has been the most challenging thing. In one instance I just removed all the frames and started over - it was quicker this way. I'm having to get in touch with my mathmatical side. As long as we're not talking algebra or calculus I'm okay with that.