Hobbies, Standards, and Ethics - Oh My!

When asked what my hobbies are, I have to suppress the urge to laugh uncontrollably. My main "hobby," web development, became an obsession quite a while ago.

I originally got into web design because I wanted to learn HTML, or hypertext markup language, and make a web site or two. One day I met someone interesting on-line on a forum at which I hang out, and this person taught me the basics of building a web page. From that point on, I have steadily increased my knowledge and understanding of how some of the most common web technologies work, from HTML, for building the structure of a web page, to PHP, for dynamically generating a HTML page "on-the-fly," to AJAX, which is a web-browser-based technology that can be used to perform validation or manipulate a page while it is being displayed. As my knowledge of web development increases, I find myself wanting to know more and more, to the point that I have spent entire evenings reading tutorials and official specification documents to try and understand how I can (or cannot) get a web page to display a certain way. It is at times both amusing and infuriating how much code it takes to implement seemingly simple and ordinary effects on a web page, such as a drop-down menu or a field that updates in real-time.

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