Tutorial 1

Much of the content in this first section was not new to me, however I did learn a few things. I learned about the difference between xhtml and html, although I had been writing markup in strict xhtml I hadn't really known it all along. The one tag that was new to me was the <dl> (defined list) tag. Also, it was nice to have the special character set explained and have a full list available. Even things I thought I knew have more to them than I first thought. Getting the formalities down is nice and exactly why I'm taking this class.

Tutorial 2

I actually learned quite a bit from this module. The biggest thing I learned was about image mapping. Previoiusly I had to splice an image and chop it together with CSS to make the same type of effect work. I can think of several instances where this would have been useful to know about. I also got some good clarification on using placeholders. Other things that were covered, such as the <a> and <img> tags, I was completely familiar with.

HTML History

I first used the web in 1995, after getting our first family computer in 1994 (which was an Apple Performa if I remember correctly). It was fascinating to me even at that time. I remember the links idea being fairly new, and search engines and organized linking were almost non-existent. I once checked out a book from the library called The Internet Yellowbook. It was literally a phonebook-type printing with thousands upon thousands of web pages, categorized with their links there for you to look up and type in. Videos were unheard of and images were rare. Anyway, onto the actual history...

It seems that HTML was first proposed in about 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist at CERN. He had written a simple browser on the NeXT computing platform (go Steve Jobs!) and distributed it to a few colleagues at CERN. At the time he suggested about 20 "tags" based on the structure used by SGML, a document markup language. The first few drafts of HTML (HTML and HTML+) expired about 6 months after they were drafted in early 1994. In 1995, HTML 2.0 was drafted as the first version from which future drafts were to be based on. In 1996, the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has been maintaining the HTML standards.

HTML version 4.01 is the latest recommendations to be published and includes three types: strict, transitional and frameset. This was published in December of 1999. In May of 2000, HTML became an international standard (ISO/IEC 15445:2000). Although these are the latest recommendations, in January 2008 the W3C released HTML5 as a working draft.

Researching this got me excited for HTML5 as well as reminded me of some early memories of dealing with HTML. For example, I remember using the marquee tag used by Netscape back in the day and thinking how neat it was on one of my very first web pages. I also remember toying around with Netscape and Opera browsers before Internet Explorer came out, and my dad talking about how revolutionary Windows 95 was going to be. This last few weeks I've been trying out several HTML5-compliant web browsers (IE9, Firefox 4, Opera 10.6 and Chrome) and websites to see if I could pick out the differences. The things I've noticed so far are faster load times and smoother scrolling, but not much else. I'm sure as HTML5 gets closer to being published as a standard and developers adopt it more the differences will be more obvious. Personally, for now, I still prefer Flash to the new HTML5 because the video seems to be less choppy. But then again, it's still in its infancy.

CSS History

From my reading, it seems that the concept of a stylesheet was first introduced in in Tim Barners-Lee�s NeXT browser, which had basic stylesheet capabilities built-in, but only on the browser side of things. A real draft for what we know today as CSS was not proposed until October 10, 1994 by Hakon Wium Lie. Although there were several ideas about what a stylesheet should be at the time, Lie�s stylesheet had the idea of interaction and prioritization between the author, the user, and the browser stylesheets. This concept is called the cascade.

Microsoft supported the CSS movement, and implemented the first CSS into Internet Explorer 3 in 1996. It supported most color, background and text-formatting properties, but lacked the box model and several other features that eventually were recommended by CSS level 1. In 1998, Opera 3.5 and the �Gecko� engine from Mozilla (Netscape) were released, with broader support for CSS implementations. In fact, �Gecko�, which was the foundation for the modern Firefox browser, was built from the ground-up specifically with CSS in mind.

Today we have a larger pool of CSS-compliant browsers to pull from: IE 8 & 9, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome. The current standard of CSS is level 2 (CSS2.1), with a CSS3 still in the works. CSS is used to apply style to the structure (HTML) of a webpage. The main advantage of this separation of structure and style is ease in site maintenance.

I feel that CSS is one of the biggest milestones for web design. Without it, the aesthetic aspect of the web would not be where it is today, in my opinion. Sure, there is Java and other technologies, but these are generally complicated to learn and implement. Part of the glory of CSS is in its simplicity.

Web Design

I think that I may have read this article (The Principles of Beautiful Web Design) before. It's a very good article, in my opinion, for anyone looking to deal with websites in any capacity. The golden ratio and rule of thirds are the two pieces of information I take most away from this article. These concepts seem to carry over into any area where aesthetics are concerned, whether it be web design or photography or architecture. I can't really say that there was anything I could label in the article as "least interesting", but I was disappointed that so many of the figures he referred to did not show up in the reading. I also wish that he had talked a little more on color and typefacing, but perhaps that is in a later chapter of the actual book. All-in-all I think it was a great article and well-worth the reading.

Out of the Box

I really enjoyed this article! In fact I bookmarked it to use later for my wordpress projects. This article was essentially a great tutorial on how to make websites that don't adhere strictly to a box appearance, something I've been toying with and trying to figure out for a while. It was one of the main reasons I took this class initially, hoping I could figure this trick out. I feel like this article was the missing link for me. I thought the most interesting, and useful portion, was the idea of "fracturing the grid". The least interesting object was the idea of the grids and wireframes on the first page, but only because we had read about that in the previous article. All in all, it was a very good read and one I'm glad you brought to our attention.