Web Development Perceptions
I once thought that the Internet and the Web were one and the same thing—I now know better! The World Wide Web (Web) is an entirely different entity than the Internet; however, the Web could not exist without the Internet—it is dependent upon the Internet in order to function.
The Internet has an interesting history—The Cold War was the impetus to its creation, due to the desired need of a better communication system for national security. It came into being in 1969, via the collaborative efforts of the United States Department Defense and several West Coast Colleges. NASA first utilized Internet when history was made in July of 1969 as the first man walked on the Moon.
Functionally speaking what is the Internet? "…it is a global network of computers linked by high–speed data lines and wireless systems."—Henry Bojack. Between 1969 and 1992 the Internet was used basically by the Defense Department, along with educational and research institutions to transfer data (information) in text only messages.
The World Wide Web (W W W or the Web) is a function of the Internet—or maybe better said, "one of the services of the Internet. The Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them via hyperlinks. An English engineer and computer scientist, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, proposed the concept of the W W W in 1989, at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland—he is now the Director of the W3C, short for the World Wide Web Consortium ( Berners-Lee founded the W3C in 1994, for the purpose of creating compatibility in HTML between the many web browsers on the market) In 1990, a Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau and Berners-Lee proposed to use hypertext( "A way to organize information so you can click links and view Web content in a non-sequential manner."—Henry Bojack).
The motivation of these two scientists for the World-Wide Web was their desire to create " a pool of human knowledge, and human culture, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project."—2003,The New Media Reader. Section 54.The MIT Press.
If you love design and creating art and you are searching for a way to make a living—one that will still be viable in 20, 30, 40 years from now—then I would say to you (as I have already told myself)," Web Design is the profession for you!"
I have degree in Computer Graphic Design, with the focus on print—meaning I have no knowledge of Web development, aside form what have learned so far in this class. I work as a freelance designer and have missed out on many jobs because I was unable to translate my concepts and designs onto the Web. I want to become a Web page "devsigner."
HTML History
Reflections: First, what is a protocol? It is a standard for sending or receiving data over phone lines, cable, or other medium. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) is the protocol that establishes the standards for communications between file servers and client computers on the World Wide Web. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the language used to format text and graphics for the Web. The X in XHTML stands for extended—it is a stricter version, or a variation of HTML, that more clearly defines how HTML code should be written and structured. The anchor element is used for links in XHTML. The # flag character is added to the anchor element when creating a link to an id. The Uniform Resource Locater (URL) is the complete address of a Web site or Web page. The address is broken down into these parts: protocol://server is the host name of the computer being accessed/ path is the directory structure/file name/anchor name or id. (Protocol) http://(sever)www.csi.edu/(path under root directory of host)101/(file)101.html/(id or anchor name)#learn.
HTML History: In 1989 Tim-Berners-Lee invented the Web and HTML as the publishing language for the Web.
The first versions—1989, HTML 1.0 (very limiting in Web design basically could just put text on a page.) In 1991 HTML 2.0 (added new features for website design.) In 1995, HTML 3.0 came along with more tags and abilities. This is when things started to get the browser wars began as proprietary tags were added to the markup language—meaning Web pages would only open in the browser that allowed their "marked-up" language. HTML 3.0 had many other problems, as it was very slow to implement. HTML 3.2 came along addressing these issues.
In 1994, due to the browser wars (proprietary specific tags) increasing, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) was founded in order to address this issue. Its purpose was—and continues to be—to standardize the mark-up language (HTML) and keep it going in the right direction. Their first work was code-named WILBUR and became known as HTML 3.2.
January of 1997 saw the end of the browser wars, as HTML 3.2 was now supported by almost all of the browsers. At the end of the year the W3C had created and recommended a new standard, HTML 4.0—it focused on internationalization, and support for HTML's new supporting presentational language, Cascading Stylesheets (CCS). In April of 1998, HTML 4.O it became the official W3C standard.
In 1999, with a few corrections and revisions, HTML 4.1 came out. It continues to be the W3C standard in use today.
At the beginning of the 21st century the W3C brought XHTML 1.0 onto the scene. Both HTML 4.01 and XHTML are being used. The benefits of XHTML 1.0 are that it incorporates XML into HTML 4.01. The standards are stricter.
What does the future hold? HTML 5 is the standard W3C is now working on. It will be a combination of HTML 4.1 and XHTML. It is said that this will be the specification we will al be working with for the next decade, at least!
CSS History
What is CSS? It is an acronym for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is used to format the presentation of a Web page—i.e. layout, color, and fonts. HTML is used to create the structure for the content of the Web page.
Style Sheets—the language used to layout and format your web page—have been around since the 1970's. HTML was growing at this time and was including formatting properties that allowed web designers more capabilities; however, this made writing and maintaining HTML much more complex, and also led to problems because of the difference in web browser support which made consistent site appearance difficult. For these afore mentioned reasons web developers began working on creating Cascading Style Sheets as a means for creating a consistent approach to providing style information for web documents.
CSS1 specification was released in 1996; however, it took several more years before cross-browser support occurred. During this time CSS2 was created to address these issues, and in 1998 was published as a Recommendation by the W3C. We are still using CSS2 at this time. CSS2.1 and also CSS3 are both in the process of being finalized and published by the W3C.
One of the greatest things about Cascading Style Sheets is the specificity and style precedence priority scheme. This is where the concept of cascading comes into play—if more than one rule is applied to an element the priorities are calculated and the rule is applied according to where it was written into the document. Specificity is the rule that, where conflicts arise, the declaration that was written the furthest down on the style sheet will be the one that is implemented. Precedence tells us—when dealing with external, embedded, and inline styles—where conflict arises the declaration closet to the body of the document will be the one that is implemented (i.e. from first to last: inline, embedded, external style sheet).
I am grateful to be learning web design at this phase in the development of CSS. From my perspective I can understand the frustration that was involved with web design before CSS came to the rescue of diligent designers.
p.s. After validating my embedded style sheets, I have discovered that W3C is now recommending at CSS 2.1 level. Also, I would like to comment on the one of the problems that I encountered—while cutting and copying my styles from my web page onto the document.css, I somehow lost some of my code and then spent the better part of an hour or so rewriting the code directly onto the external style sheet. After this experience I can see myself from now on writing the code initially, directly, onto the document.css. I have learned my lesson!
Web Design
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, by Jason Beaird, is the topic of this journal entry. To anyone beginning their journey into the world of web design, and also for those needing a refresher course or just looking for some inspiration, I highly recommend this article.
I have a prior background in design and thus the concepts presented were familiar to me; however, I was thoroughly engaged while reading this article. Why? Design is about communication; the author, Jason Beaird, not only has the knowledge needed to convey this material, he also has the talent of being a wonderful communicator while using the written word. While reading the article one gets the feeling that Jason is a friend sharing his experience and expertise with you. He fills you in on his journey through design and reveals his previous anxieties. He gives one the sense of camaraderie among all web designers and thereby takes the intimidation of approaching web design out of the mix.
Most helpful to me were his insights into the process of creating a design—Discovery & Implementation were the two tasks he incorporated for the process. The discovery portion is all about meeting with the client and garnering all the pertinent information about the business and the owner. Learning to be creative with your questions is an important point; because, the more insights that you have into the owner and his business will help to lend to your design ideas. The next step is the implementation. This is where you create several designs from the information that you gathered. You do this on paper, and without thoughts about how you will technically portray the design on the web page. This allows for freedom to create without limits. Once you have several designs you make a mockup using Photoshop or another program such as Illustrator and then print it out to show the client. After this the next stage begins, of which I will not go into now because the article is just a mouse click of away!
Out of the Box
Out of the Box: With CSS Layouts—by Jina Bolton, is an article and tutorial that I highly recommend to anyone who is in the process of discovering the "in's and out's" of CSS. My first approach to this article was in the reading—from beginning to end I was able to absorb many of the insight the author extended. I then returned and downloaded the files provided, within the article, and worked through the tutorial. The entire process was rewardingly well worth my while!
I discovered the importance of wireframes as a visual guide to planning the layout for a website. Using the designer's grid method as a preliminary to building one's site. The point is to focus on the positioning of all the major elements that will be making up the page—without concerning one's self with the artistic details. It is the essence of your page in a blueprint type format. This method of using grids provides the means for organization, a way to define more information, and to unify all of the elements of the website into a cohesive property. Thus the merits to planning, prior to the implementation of writing any code, was gratefully imbedded into my consciousness.
"You have to know the rules before you can break them," as Jina so aptly reminded her readers. The turorial was extremely helpful in laying out the initial code with all the rules of design unbroken, and then to be followed by the code that breaks form and takes you out of the box. This is the way to create energy in your design—making it dynamic, adding a zestful appearance to one's website.
In this process I have discovered how benificial it is to study the code written by the great website designers. And too, how fortunate we all are to be in this position in time where wisdom can be found so readily (just a click away). I am still learning the rules, while I look forward to breaking out of the box!
Tables Vs. CSS—A Fight to the Death
Sergio Villarreal, a self-professed computer geek, wrote this article back in 2004. At that time Tables vs. CSS was a big topic for web designers. Prior to CSS the use of "tables" for page layout on the web had been the solution to the designer's need to create formatted pages for the Web.
Anyone who has just recently entered the world of web design would serve themselves well to read this article. Sergio is an engaging writer; it is as if he is talking with you directly. There wasn't one moment—while reading his explanation of these two methods for creating well–organized structure on a web page—which I faltered in my interest.
He took the reader through the process of creating the exact same web page twice. First he used "tables". He went through the process step by step for both methods—he wrote the code and timed himself. This was an experiment of sorts to help web designers to decide if they wanted to take the time to learn CSS or to stay with the old way and continue using "tables."
Tables vs. CSS A Fight to the Death, is a read that I would recommend to anyone interested in the history of web design. It is amazing when realizing that it this was written six years ago and to see how fast these innovations have been taking hold of the Web.
Sergio concluded via his experiment that CSS was the winner—he urged all serious designers to make to effort in study time to learn CSS. Six years later his experiment has won the test of time, as CSS reigns supreme in page layout, and the use of "tables" for page layout is now considered passé.
Get Specific with Your CSS Styles
Get Specific with Your CSS Styles, is an extremely beneficial article ⁄ tutorial for anyone in the process of learning about the process of "specificity" in CSS. If you are in any way not quite clear on how "specificity" works, this article imparts that knowledge in a precise way.
I liked the way specificity was explained with the column method and how it was different back when CSS 1 was using the weighted method. The article explained both approaches to "specificity".
I would suggest to the reader to be prepared to focus and concentrate in order to garner the content to its fullest. This first time I attempted to read this article I was not in that frame of mind and thus had to return to it when I was more prepared. I guess what I am saying is that it wasn't the easiest of reads but it was extremely worth my while. I now have a good understanding of in's and out's of "Specificity!"