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My Learning Journals:

Web Development Perceptions -

  • Some of the things I learned while working through Tutorial 1 were that the 'b' and 'i' tags for bold and italicize are no longer supported. We are suposed to use the new tags 'strong' and 'em' because they are the new standard. I also had no idea about the 'DOCTYPE' at the top of the document to help browsers know how to load the webpage.
  • This is my first offical web development course. I know this class is going in the direction of teaching me the new standard for HTML and CSS coding/style. Unfortunately I don't think that there are mainly jobs in this area they would pay well for a web designer/developer. The best thing I have found is to go into business for yourself. In the Boise area it might be easier to find this type of job at a company but, around here most businesses are too small to need a part/full time employee to run a website.

HTML History -

  • I learned while working through Tutorial 2 about Links and Image Maps. I already understood file locations and links but I did not know about images maps and all of the options.
  • Tim Berners-Lee started HTML and he demonstrated the prototype on a NeXT workstation becuase it had the properenvironment for developing the prototype. He tried to keep the language simple to encourage other developers to run with his ideas.
  • Many people say that the future of HTML is XML a very strict formatting set that requires all tags to be typed in lower case letters. We are already seeing changes to the standard HTML formatting when programming in XHTML. I think that HTML is pretty much where it will stay for quite a few years. CSS on the other hand is going to offer some amazing styling options with the release of CSS3 in a few years. For example with will be able to make your own rounded borders/background without the use of seperate images. I had to use 6 different image and a lot of extra code to make the rounded border effect that you see on this site.

CSS History -

  • The purpose of HTML is to display content, text and images, on the internet. The purpose of CSS is to format and give character to the content that HTML displays. The benefit to CSS is that it have a hierarchical structure and central control point. For example if you have 100 'p' tags in your webpage and you need to apply a property or setting to them, in HTML you are on your own to type in the new code for all 100 of them. With CSS you can easily apply a property to almost an HTML element from a central location in your HTML document.
  • Most modern web browsers support CSS v2.1
  • In the release of CSS3 most all of the browsers will support rounded borders on any block level elements by default.

Web Design -

  • I feel it was worth the time to read through this article. http://www.sitepoint.com/article/principles-beautiful-web-design
  • The thing I liked least was that it seemed like it was a bit repetative toward the end of the article. He was saying the same thing in a little different way. I know he was probably just doing that to help you remember.
  • I really liked how the writter went over most common layouts and ways to get insperation like a digital morgue file. Collect a bunch of screenshots of similar websites and like at them often for insperation.

Out of the Box -

  • This was a very interesting article. http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/breaking-out-of-the-box
  • I especially liked how it teaches you to work with adding extra padding and margins, and then assigning negative margins to some elements to give the appearance of being abstract.
  • I also did not think about floating both content and sidebar divs to the right. This works because the content-primary div is written first in the HTML code for the page.
  • Overall I think that this was a very helpful article and was worth the time.

Tables vs. CSS -

  • Being from the table based web design era I have been partial to tables for years. I found this article to be very true to all of the issues I have run into over the years.
  • Good old HTML had good control over the layout of your page but, usually you end up using about double the code and the time to make a similar website.
  • What I found most interesting, because I have wondered about this myself, was the number of lines in the code needed to organize and make sense of all the HTML formatting. in this article author Sergio Villarreal showed us by example the limitations to something as simple as removing the underline from a link.
  • By using CSS Sergio, the author, was able to cut the complexity and length of code from 244 lines down to 170. Not to mention that a regular person can read through the code and pick out the content easily. In the standard only HTML version it is near impossible to read and understand without hours of studying.
  • Sergio used 17 differnt tables to finish the design and have it look right.
  • I am using Tables and Divs in my website right now but, that is only because I wanted to have rounded corners on my containers for each section of my site. Also my tables resize and stretch to fit any size of content without getting messed up. I then have a DIV inside my container table to better control the content.
  • Over all I think this article was well worth my time. It does relate well to the class.

Specificity -

  • When I started reading this article I only had a basic understanding of the rules of CSS specificity. I knew that the order of specificity went "InLine, Embedded CSS, Linked CSS, then Browser CSS". I didn't fully understand the process to calcuate which style would be used.
  • After reading the article it does make a lot more sense. You should always start from the top down when coding your CSS. Put your global CSS common for all of the pages on your website into your linked CSS file. Then you can put CSS that is only specific to your page in the embedded style sheet. You should only rarely ever need to use inline styles. This will also help with the time it takes you to debug your code. If all styles are in easy to read CSS files or areas in your code you know right where to look to fix an issue.
  • In conclusion by reading this article I gainned a better understanding of the process the browser goes through to pick the styles that are used, when the same element is styled several different times.
  • I feel this article was also well worth my time to study it. Plus it was short so it wasn't that hard to get through.