Back to TopThis was the first Tutorial and it was packed full of information. The beginning was a quick history of the internet which I am probably one of the few people in the class that was aware of it while it was happening. I learned coding, organization, definitions, the necessary components for a webpage, their uses, vacant elements, special characters, lists, inserting graphics and much more. Web design seems to be very logical and highly coded. I think the ability to memorize codes would be a big plus but cheat sheets are probably going to be my best friend. Web design has so many facets and applications. I don’t think there will be as much need for “Web designers” in the future because I think they are going to make the code much easier to learn and the common computer user will be able to design their own web page without the help of professionals. Or Web designers might become like Blip Printers and be open for business to spruce up web pages that the common person designed. Web designers can work as a fee self employed person who charges by the job or they can work for large companies and design highly complex web pages. The ability to purchase items over the web has probably become the web designer’s best friend because the need to update the page and maintain it is very important. I hope that after I’m done with this and several other classes I can change occupations into the computer industry, hopefully in web design.
This Tutorial was mostly about creating links, links from words, links from pictures, links from sections of pictures. Links to other pages & links to webpages. I find it very confusing, maybe I'm not getting the jargin but some of the rules don't seem to make sense to me. The other part of this Tutorial is to FTP our files onto a server. This whole thing went WAY over my head. I hope these things make sense soon.
Now for the research section of this journal. HTML was first publicly available in late 1991. It originally had 20 elements of which 13 still exist. HTML+ was developed after that to add tables and fill-out forms in the late 1993. In 1995 HTML 2.0 was released and was considered to be, "the first HTML specification intended to be treated as a standard against which future implementations should be based." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML Since 1996 has been maintained by W3C. In January 1997 HTML 3.2 was released without any math formulas but it did reconcile overlaps and proprietary extensions and adopted most of Netscape's visual markup tags. 14 months later they added math formulas with the addition of MathML. December 1997 HTML 4.0 was published with 3 variations, Strict, Transitional & Frameset. This version set out to remove Netscape's visual markup features by depricating them. In April 1998 HTML 4.0 was reissued with minor changes. In December 1999 HTML 4.1 was published as a W3C recommendation. It used the same 3 variations as 4.0. In May 2000 ISO/IEC (ISO HTML is based on HTML Strict) became an international standard. During the early to mid 2000's XHMTL was being developed as a parallel standard with more strict rules. Mid 2008 HTML 4.01 and ISO/IEC 15445:2000 are the most recent versions of HTML. Now the history is written, the problems were to addition and removal of certain aspects. Also, the ability for companies such as Netscape and Micorsoft to write their own extenstions to make webpages incompatable with each other. With the release of HTML 5.0 hopefully standards will be set and all browsers will utilize the same code so that all pages work on all browsers.
CSS is a derivative of SSP and CHSS and was proposed as CSS in 1994 by W3C. CSS has become a major player in Web design in the recent past due to the extensive use of the web. Nearly every home has a computer, phones are not internet capable and CSS enables the web pages to display in an attractive format. While HTML is the "content" CSS is the "presentation". Style sheets are beneficial as they are all coding, without the content. If you want to change the appearence of a web page all you have to do is change the style sheet, not go through each line of content and change it there. CSS is currently version 2.1 and version 3 is in the works. The anticipated changes for CSS 3 are the changing of format from one big page to several smaller modules which allow new capabilities or enhance the current version. Several modules are done, however, the entire version is still not complete. I am so excited every time I do one of the tutorials or cases in the homework that I can change it like I do. I love working with HTML but find it a little more difficult due to the placement rules and not as "english" as CSS. CSS is very exciting because that's where the fun and creativity begins.
The article was interesting. I particularly liked the part about not forgetting to balance presentation and usability. I've been on websites before that I now the designer was all about presentation and it wasn't a very user friendly website. Cohesive page design for multi-page websites makes sense so the reader won't think they've changed companies. Some of the information seemed elementary or common sense but I guess others may need the information spoon fed to them.
The artilce was interesting and very advanced. I don't like the examples including so many extra codes like the br in brackets. The ideas are great but I have trouble following when it's written out like that. I understand the examples are AWSOME but way over my head. I think I'll refer back to it when I'm designing my webpage but it seems way over my head right now. The writer didn't explain the numbers either. I wish he would have told me why dividing by 12 is important or why he divided 960 by 5 for the header and first column.
The article spoke over my head. Since I am new to designing I really don't know what he was talking about with reference to the "old table based design and javascrpt". I'm sure it was pain staking because the timeline he wrote out showed significant delays. The new CSS saved him 2 hours in designing the same webpage. It seems to me that new programming usually is better than the older methods, otherwise why would they invent new ones. I found it spoke over my head and I really didn't get much from it other than newer is better. I found nothing interesting but if I had to pick one thing I guess it would be the small history lesson it provided. The least interesting part is the drawn out description of what he did for the programming. Too wordy for the quick minimal information provided.
Spedificity has been a mystery to me since you introduced it. I kind of got it but still didn't understand it real well. After reading the article it made me feel so much better about it. I really liked the chart with the lable that gave the numbers to a,b,c,d. I guess I'm a visual learner. The article did take a little while to get going and unfortunately the examples it was showing didn't seem to speak to me. I was still having trouble understanding the examples vs. what he was saying. The chart in the middle helped out tremendousely.