For a while now, I’ve had a dream. My work in the last 8 or 9 years has been heavily focused around education, whether I’ve been commissioning and editing technical books to help people create cool stuff with technology, training new employees at the various companies I’ve worked for, or editing and writing tutorial articles to help people use Opera’s software. I am passionate about the Web too, and a big believer in open web standards. I wanted to do my bit to help make the Web a better place, and I think this comes back to education, whether that’s teaching people how to collaborate and have more respect for one another, or teaching them how to make their web sites work across platforms and devices, and be accessible to people with disabilities. Web standards are key to the latter, so I decided to try putting my time and energy into something that would help increase the adoption of web standards on the Web today and in the future. It has been floating around my head for a while now, but it has finally come to fruition at Opera—many thanks to my wonderful employers for paying me to do this! One of my dreams has finally been realised.

So in this article I introduce to you the product of a lot of hard work over the last several months (by myself and a lot of other people)—the Web Standards Curriculum, a course designed to give anyone a solid grounding in web design/development, no matter who they are—it is completely free to use, accessible, and assumes no previous knowledge. I am mainly aiming this at universities, as I believe the standards of education in web standards to be somewhat lacking at many universities. I’ve heard tales of students being marked down for using web standards in their coursework, because the marking schemes are so outdated; I’ve also heard tales of employers despairing because when they interview university graduates for web–related positions, they find out that the graduates really don’t have a clue about real world web development. If you’re at a progressive university that does teach web standards in a reasonable fashion, then I tip my hat to you—get in touch!

Are you looking for a basic understanding of how UIs are created on the web or who wants to brush up outdated UI development knowledge? Or maybe you'd like to learn more about the medium you're designing for and gain basic tools for prototyping designs? Do you want a better understanding of the web and how Google makes the pages that are its face to the world? If so, "HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from the Ground Up" is for you.

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Dive Into HTML5 seeks to elaborate on a hand-picked Selection of features from the HTML5 specification and other fine Standards. I shall publish Drafts periodically, as time permits. Please send feedback. The final manuscript will be published on paper by O’Reilly, under the Google Press imprint. Pre-order the printed Work and be the first in your Community to receive it. The Work shall remain online under the CC-BY-3.0 License.