Over a weekend, I read the first tutorial in Blended HTML, XHTML and CSS. Most of this material was already familiar to me, but I did learn that I had been using several deprecated elements. Over the next couple of days, I completed the case problems.
My perception of Web development is that it was a very fast-growing industry and is very strong today. I am not sure it is a good career path to pursue, however, due to a saturation of freelance Web designers who get very little work. Then again, this idea is based on approximately zero minutes of research.
As for what I want to do with knowledge of HTML, I expect to maintain a personal Web site. It will most likely be a collection of mundane, unrelated ramblings updated whenever I feel like it, probably every few months. Half of these updates will be apologies for not updating more often. I will refuse to call this a blog. It will also contain bad drawings and clips of bizarre noise.
I wouldn't want to be a professional Web designer. It's simply not something I think I would enjoy. Of course, very few people have a job they enjoy, so a case can be made that I should "count my blessings" or whatever.
Immediately after finishing Tutorial 1, I read Tutorial 2 and completed all but the last case problem. On Monday the 31st I completed the last case problem in Tutorial 2. I then spent quite a lot of time writing this journal, a fictional "resume" (which is actually just the required lists), and a non-fictional "about me" page. I'm a slow writer. It occurs to me that I should probably write an actual resume soon.
In the eighties, Tim Berners-Lee began work on what would eventually become the World Wide Web. His objective was to create a means of sharing information across different types of computers with different software. In 1991 the Web was presented to the public, along with HTTP and HTML. The early adopters were mostly universities; personal and corporate Web presences were uncommon, as Internet access was not widespread. However, it took only a few years for the Web to become extremely popular. The W3C was founded in 1994 to maintain Web standards.
Early versions of HTML were very basic; they only offered simple structure and hyperlinks. Later, support for now-familiar features such as images was added. When tables appeared, they were quickly and relentlessly used for managing page layouts instead of actual tables. (In fact, when I first learned about tables years ago, I promptly did this myself.) The introduction of CSS made these table-based layouts obsolete, but they remain in wide use.
It's hard to talk about the history of the World Wide Web without mentioning the "dot-com bubble." Hundreds of entrepreneurs starting hundreds of Web-based businesses, resulting in hundreds of bankruptcies. Of course, some successful companies did come out of this.
My progression through tutorials 3 and 4 was quick and uneventful. This time, I did not do the final case problems, on account of them being very time-consuming and not required. I find CSS easy to use for the most part, but a few things confuse me; the example that leaps to mind immediately is the order of shorthand properties, which seems downright arbitrary.
Before CSS, Web developers had to use HTML to manage their sites' appearances. Complicated layouts required complicated code; features were added to HTML to allow Web developers more control over their layouts, but each change made HTML more difficult to use. Eventually, W3C saw the need to separate page structure from page style; many different languages for style sheets were proposed, and CSS was eventually chosen. One thing that distinguished CSS from most style languages was that multiple style sheets could influence a single document (the "cascading" part).
The CSS level 1 Recommendation was published in December 1996; level 2 was published in May 1998. It took years for browsers to accommodate CSS, making adoption slow and painful for Web developers (even today there are people who avoid CSS). CSS3 has been in development for a rather long time. There are many new features in CSS3; some that strike me as especially useful are support for alpha (transparency) in text color, media queries (adapting layouts to, e.g., display size), and multi-column layouts.
Tutorial 5 took a single day. The midterm project took several, mostly because, as mentioned, I am a slow writer. The newly introduced properties seem simple enough.
I read the article about Web design that I was supposed to read. I had already heard nearly everything said there, but it seems quite well-written. There are, of course, quite a few things to keep in mind when designing a Web page; ease of use, balance of the layout, general aesthetics, and compatibility with displays of different shapes and sizes, not to mention coming up with a design that actually makes sense for the subject and pleases the client.
Personally, I don't like Web sites with complicated layouts. I usually prefer to see very few images and colors, and definitely no animation. I am aware that most people don't feel this way. I also find the somewhat-recent trend of navigation bars (or worse, advertisements) that follow as you scroll down the page to be very annoying; worse than the blink tag, in fact. Of course, nothing can top embedded MIDI as far as pointlessly irritating features, though that one has fortunately long died out.
One thing I've noticed is that a lot of people and some businesses get a Web site and a fancy design for it, but fail to actually have any content. I think that nowadays there is too much emphasis placed on the presentation rather than what you are presenting - that's not to say presentation isn't important, of course. This seems especially common with small businesses, purchasing an elaborate design and use it for only an address and a few paragraphs.
Tutorials 6 and 7 seemed quite a bit more involved than the previous; it took a couple of days for each. The case problems seemed no more complicated, however. Actually creating a layout and applying it to my pages was much more time-consuming. I think I understand the material quite well, however.
The "Breaking Out of the Box" article did not present anything especially new to me. Personally, I like boxes; they tell me what I'm actually supposed to be looking at. Of course, since you're looking at this site right now, you've probably already concluded that. Again, if I end up doing actual Web design, I will try to discard this opinion.
I managed to find a color scheme that was less eye-searing than that used for my midterm project. It is, admittedly, still rather simple and on the typical side. If nothing else, it is colorblind-friendly. It will also be appreciated by those using greyscale monitors, which would be an important thing to consider if anyone still used greyscale monitors.
Creating a print style was very easy. I expected it to be harder, but my pages are conveniently lacking in complexity, as well as content; while this makes the print style easy to create, it also makes the lack of content incredibly obvious to anyone who chooses to print the page.
Tutorials 8 and 9 were uneventful. I found the ending of the textbook rather abrupt. The handling of data tables and forms seems intuitive enough.
The article linked to comes to some fairly simple conclusions: browser support for table-based layouts is better than browser support for CSS (unsurprising, since HTML tables are older), and table-based layouts are conceptually simpler. However, CSS is more flexible, much easier to maintain, and better for e.g. screen readers. One debatable advantage of table-based layouts this article doesn't mention is that the difficulty of maintaining complicated ones encouraged people to keep their layouts simple and sane.
I find it interesting that table-based layouts remain so prevalent today. It shows just how slow adoption of a new standard can be. Not that it's hard to find examples of this (the entire line from vinyl records to music CDs to non-physical media is a very popular one). There seems to still be a considerable number of people advancing that table-based layouts are superior to CSS-based layouts.
Getting the final project done on time was harder than I had first expected, because the deadline was suddenly pushed two weeks earlier. I couldn't even get the CreditRoll applet to work in the example provided, so I did not implement it. I won't say I'm proud of the general design I came up with, but I think it's functional.
Specificity and precendence of styles doesn't seem particularly complicated to me. The narrower the scope of a style, the higher its precedence. The mechanic of adding up all those numbers is confusing, but so far it looks to me like you don't actually need it barring a few very specific and practically unlikely situations.
Reflecting on the entire course, the most difficult parts were the non-textbook assignments. In particular, thinking of material for this learning journal was always very hard, and coming up with original Web page designs was also hard at times (you can probably tell).
My mother, a psychologist, would like me to make a business Web site for her. I think that this will serve as a good test of the knowledge I've gained from this course.