Web Development Perceptions
So far in this class, I’ve learned more about HTML than I’ve ever been acquainted with. This is my first web development course and my current perception of web design is that it is very detailed, very formulaic, and very ordered, which I enjoy. I had no idea that there were different standards for HTML/XHTML, etc. and was intrigued to find out what deprecated code is, and how certain pieces of code eventually fall out of use. I think web design is headed towards a more common skill in everyday life. I believe in the next ten years, most everyone will be familiar with web design on a template level (such as WordPress) if not on a ‘coding level’, such as we are learning in this course.
Some of the occupations available to web developers currently are creating web pages for businesses/individuals, troubleshooting or modifying existing sites for businesses/individuals, teaching HTML to others, and perhaps working for the W3C or researching guidelines in coding, etc. Many companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and thousands of other companies need web developers, so the job market potential is there for qualified applicants.
With my knowledge, I want to make myself a more employable person in the technology field. I’ve heard that Microsoft developers with specific training can earn a good salary, so a knowledge in HTML will help me start towards that path. I might also look into journalistic blogging as a career, so anything that will educate me in technology will hopefully make me more employable. A knowledge of HTML will also give me the opportunity to have fun making my own web pages or helping other people with theirs’.
HTML History
In this chapter, I’ve learned many new concepts that have helped cement the structure of building a website. Linking from page to page on a site, creating external links, creating image maps, etc. have all helped with my understanding of how to make a coherent site.
Some of the early problems of web development were that the structure of a webpage was not separated from the ‘style’ of a webpage. XHTML and CSS are now used to help with this issue. One example of a change in separation of ‘style’ from ‘structure’ was the deprecation of Netscape's visual markup aspects, which was replaced by style sheets.
I found it interesting that it wasn’t until HTML 4 that three different types of W3C recommended coding were used: strict, transitional, and frameset.
Some implications of future changes are the fact that HTML 5 is adding <video> and <audio> elements, which show the growing desire for enhanced graphical capabilities on the web.
CSS History
CSS has recently come into much more wide spread usage since web developers have realized the value of separating a web page’s structure and content (XHTML) from its formatting, styles, and more visual elements (CSS). The advantage of doing this is that it keeps content data organized and separated from the stylistic changes of CSS, making web development easier and more logical.
The benefit of using style sheets is that instead of editing around each individual content (via inline), or even putting an embedded style sheet in the HTML document, web developers can have one style sheet that links to multiple documents. This allows them to update and change their webpage’s style and design much easier, as well as link that style to multiple HTML pages. Currently, the supported version of CSS is 2.1 and next year, CSS 3 should hopefully see a beginning as the new standard. Some changes of CSS 3 will be the addition of the ‘background-size’ property which will add the ability to change the background size of an image by length, percentage, or ‘contain’ or ‘cover’ keywords.
I currently am excited to learn more about CSS. It feels more overwhelming than XHTML because of the vast amount of properties and values that can be used, as well as the cascading order of styles, but it gives me the opportunity to start having fun and tweaking my webpages, which is great.
Web Design
I thought The Principles of Beautiful Web Design article was definitely worth my time. I found the process of ‘Design and Implementation’ very interesting. The writer’s advice to, “Keep in mind that this meeting isn’t about impressing the client, selling yourself, or selling a web site. The initial client meeting is about communication”, (Beaird) was great. It’s very true that in the excitement of first getting a project assigned, you might get too focused on all the exciting ways you’d like to implement the project, and lose sight of the necessity to listen to what the client wants and write down those needs. Also, I thought the writer’s advice to sketch out a mockup/color scheme in Photoshop was very helpful.
I didn’t disagree or dislike anything in the article, but if I had to pick the least interesting aspect, I would say it was the listing of the anatomical parts of the webpage (such as navigation, content, logo). This was a great thing to put into the article and a good refresher, but since we’ve mostly studied it in class, it wasn’t as necessary to me.
Out of the Box
I did find the Out of the Box article worth while. I really liked the fact that the author decided to prove her main point, that CSS isn’t boring and ‘boxy’, by creating a tutorial of a website that is interesting and appealing. Just because css structure is regimented and the formatting is strict in many ways doesn’t mean that it can’t be interesting and eye-catching. The part I found most interesting in the article was when she showed how to use a more aesthetically pleasing footer that curved and resembled a wave. I would’ve never thought to use something like that, but it looks very cool and different. The part I found not as enjoyable was the fact that it was a tutorial, and therefore you had to read the code carefully to follow what was going on. This is kind of the point of a tutorial-type writing though, so I really have nothing to complain about.
Tables vs. CSS.
This article was very worthwhile. I hadn’t realized the amount of markup needed in table-based designs versus CSS, and the complexity of the many nested table elements. I really liked the comparison between CSS and Table-based when the author stated that, “...working with tables felt like building with lego bricks, with incremental changes, CSS felt more like working with a highly trained professional -- I issued a set of orders and watched as they were carried out” (sitepoint). After doing a little bit of work with tables over the last tutorial, I can see the difficulty and practice needed to become proficient with tables. If I had to pick one thing I didn’t like about this article, it would probably just be that it’s a little outdated, as far as browsers, etc. go. In reality though, that doesn’t affect the article at all and probably adds to the history of CSS vs. Tables.
Specificity
I also thought this article was worthwhile. The ‘cascade’ of CSS is one of the hardest things for me to grasp, since it takes some practice getting comfortable looking at CSS markup in firebug, and troubleshooting to see which properties are taking effect and which are not. If something fails to work in HTML, you can usually attribute it to faulty data or a missing paragraph tag or something. In CSS, it’s more difficult to see exactly what’s missing or what rule shouldn’t be there. I’d never thought to count up the total number of selectors as a means of figuring out which declaration would be the most specific. It makes sense though and was interesting to see that the W3C has guidelines as to how that specificity is calculated.
