Objectives

• To understand the role of web standards
• To increase familiarity with style sheets
• To understand the use of tables on the web
• To know how to troubleshoot HTML errors and create valid HTML code
• To reinforce good web publishing practices

Overview: Web Standards

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): speaking a common language
• HTML standard has evolved over time: HTML 1.0 (extinct), HTML 2.0 (extinct), HTML 3.2 (almost extinct), HTML 4.01 (what we use in these workshops), XHTML 1.1 (where HTML is headed next)
• Other markup languages: XML, MathML
• Other web standards: Web Accessibility Initiative, Cascading Style Sheets, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
• Standards and web browsers

Exercise 1: Is Your HTML Up to Code? [ 30 minutes ]

More on Style Sheets

• CSS summary
• Review of style sheet rules
• Four ways to include styles: linked, embedded, imported, and inline
• Classes and ID Selectors
• Inheritance
• The "cascade"
• HTML elements: link, div

Exercise 2: Add Some Class To Your Style [ 30 minutes ]

Tables and Web Pages

• Use of tables: tabular data, layout
• HTML for tables: table, tr, td, th
• Attributes: rowspan, colspan
• Browser differences

Exercise 3: Add a Table [ try this one on your own ]

HTML Editors

• Page and site production tools
• Beware – not all editors are equal
• Higher-end (recommended) editors include:
  

  Product	Publisher	Platform	Price	Availability
  Dreamweaver	Adobe	PC or Mac	~$100	UO Bookstore
  GoLive	Adobe	PC or Mac	~$90	UO Bookstore
  HTML-Kit	Chami	PC	Free	Download

• Advantages: More efficient for quick web page production, especially with graphics and tables; they can import HTML code from existing pages; wide variety of features; numerous free extensions and plug-ins available; build libraries of styles and scripts that you can reuse
• Disadvantages: They can be cumbersome if you're used to coding by hand; they're not perfect and often introduce errors into your code
• Demo: using HTML Tidy to clean up generated code

Guidelines for Good Practice

• Know your message. Figure out what you want/need to say and how you should say it before you start coding pages.
• Know your audience. Who are they? What do they expect/want/need from the you? From the web? What kinds of environments are they working in? What hardware and software do they have available? The appearance of a web site can vary between environments, depending on the hardware (e.g., monitor size & resolution), operating system, and browser. Users' technical abilities also vary widely, as do connection speeds.
• Know your resources. Well-crafted web sites take time to both develop and maintain.

What We Didn't Cover

It's impossible to list everything we didn't cover in these three workshops, but here are some general areas of development you might want to explore as you develop your web skills further:

• Programming and scripting for the web (e.g., perl, javascript, PHP)
• Dynamically generated web pages
• Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (e.g., layers, positioning)
• Graphics and multimedia production
• Web usability
• Designing for accessibility