P: What are you watching?
Me: The Lost World
P: Ah right. Not the Jurassic Park one? Was Bob Hoskins in that?
Me: No, this is the other one - made for TV. It’s by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
P: Oh right
Me: He wrote the Sherlock Holmes books
P: [beat] … Really? Gerraway.
Me: Yeah
P: [grinning] …That reminds me - you must tell me more about this HTML you keep banging on about…
Me: [blush]

Sometimes I forget that P’s got a bloody good education. Oops.*

Talking about HTML like that is a sort of running joke in our household. It stems from a wedding I was at a couple of years ago, at which I met the partner of a colleague. Since the last time I’d met him, this bloke had changed careers from civil engineering to web design. I’d met him a few times before, at work shindigs and the like, and we’d always managed to chat quite amiably about the bridge he was working on or whatever, or about my work on the web, but this time it was different.

He was entirely full of himself and his opinions. Over canapes and champagne, he explained to me in excrutiatingly patronising tones that web design involved using a coding language called Aitch-Tee-Em-Ell, which was very complicated indeed.

When I pointed out that I’d actually been in the industry for four years or so, he laughed and said, disbelievingly, “Oh really? Well in that case, what do you use to program HTML?”

I told him fingers, notepad, imagination, sometimes Homesite or Dreamweaver, but mostly I just prefer to handcode.

He snorted derisively and told me most professional web designers worth their salt use Dreamweaver.

So I pointed out that while I could see why, I personally found it clunky and sometimes restrictive, and didn’t like the imposition of its superfluous code structures on my work.

He told me that I only felt like that because I clearly wasn’t using it properly.

I tried very very hard not to kick him in the shins with my posh wedding shoes.

HTML is not a black art. It’s not programming, and it’s not design. It’s markup code.

Anyway, since then, asking someone to explain this fantastic H-T-M-L programming language is a sort of shortcut for saying “Yes, I’m aware of that. Tell me something else I’m already aware of…”

* I should point out that at this stage, a mild (and good-natured) quibble erupted over P’s assertion that he went to a better university than me. He was joking, but I still disagree.

He went to Durham, I went to Liverpool, we both got the same class of degree in totally different subject disciplines.

I maintain that certain universities are more reknowned for particular subjects than others, and that individual course reputation is more important. One of the main reasons I went to Liverpool is that it had the best reputation in the UK for the course I wanted to do - plus it offered a third year of fieldwork abroad. Pretty important.

The reputation of the university as a whole wasn’t that important to me - though I’m still convinced that once you get over the classist nonsense of Oxbridge and the Oxbridge rejects institutions (Bristol, Durham, you know what I mean) universities are all much the same, and courses are more important that university standing, as well as location. Or am I wrong?

Some universities have a hard time because of the city they are located in - I’m thinking here of Bradford or the University of Essex. Nothing wrong with the universities, but they have a stigma because some people don’t particularly want to study in Colchester or wherever.

If you went to university, where did you go (or where are you studying now, or where will you be going?) and why there?