It literally takes two weeks or less to learn HTML and CSS. They're not even programming languages... they're markup languages. I'm not trying to bash on you or anything, it's just the way I see it. The transition from XHTML to HTML is nearly painless. You close all your tags in the correct order, make sure that tags that don't have close tags are appended with a slash anyway and that's pretty much all you need to know.
I remember every HTML tag and CSS property I've learned too, but that doesn't mean there's more that I've accidentally forgotten about or never discovered. If you look deeply enough, I bet you'll find a lot of CSS properties you've never even heard of.
I was eight years old and I really hated computers a lot. If I tried to learn HTML and CSS now I'm sure I could learn it easily in a month (combined). You forget, you've been around computers a longer time then I have. When I started learning I didn't care for computers, I didn't like computers. So naturally I wouldn't want to spend a LOT of time learning something that I thought I would never ever use in real life. You're entitled to your own opinion on how easy/hard it is to learn, but all I can say is as an eight year old it's hard++ (especially when you can't sit tall enough to see the monitor.
). And I said it was the closest to a programming language (at least, I think I did..) I'd ever attempted. I didn't know what VB was, what C was, I just assumed computers were magical boxes that knew everything for themselves. And the transition from HTML to XHTML was difficult for me because encorporating Javascript (I forgot to mention I knew javascript in-depth for a couple years.. I forgot about it/don't care about it anymore) was suddenly difficult to do without the W3 validator ringing errors and my website arbitrarily pissing. It was also not being able to use "width=" and "height=" and some other things, but that was an easy incorporation.
I've seen a LOT of tags and properties, but none of them would ever be of ANY use to me so I didn't bother committing them to memory. I'm sure there are some I've never seen -- the W3C is making HTML 4.0.1(2?) and adding new tags and stuff.
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I taught myself how to play and beat my dad in chess on the computer when I was 5... it just depends on the way you think, I guess. I suppose that's not a very valid comparison and I don't want to play the "I'm better than you because <X> and <Y> is a stupid argument" game...
Javascript is very useful in some cases. I never really use it in very large doses, but I regularly make use of some of its functions.