Paul's Blog 07017421: 14th Entry

This week’s lecture has an introduction to web development, in particular the two languages XHTML and CSS. I’m really glad we’ve moved onto this area because I’ve been web designing since I first taught myself HTML when I was 13 but like Photoshop was never taught professionally.

First we looked at HTML or hyper text mark-up language, the original code for the world wide web which uses a series of tags to create the desired effect or function. It’s advantages include that there are a fixed set of tags, it’s simple to use and there’s no need to include language definition. It’s suited for hypertext, multimedia, small simple documents and the web in general.

Mark-up can be split into two groups, logical and presentational. The logical mark-up deals with the functions while the presentational mark-up deals with the presentation. The idea is that you should not mix the two mark-ups together, this is where the two below languages come in.

XHTML is a replacement for HTML. It’s a lot stricter than HTML which tends to be very forgiving. If done correctly, XHTML only contains logical mark-up code. XHTML comes with a few variations to accommodate different users. We’re going to be using XHTML strict – the purest of the versions.

CSS or cascading style sheets contains the presentational mark-up. The XHTML file links to the CSS file so it can present the content correctly. Because the presentational mark-up is contained within one file, it is very easy to change, very useful if your website contains a lot of pages.

Sometimes there can be a few errors in your code that you may not notice. These errors can create unpredictable results for curtain browsers or users using curtain settings. Therefore you should always validate your code. On a personal note I have never properly validated my code. I did once but it came up with some errors even though me and seemingly my client and client's customers could display it perfectly, so I’ve always regarded validation as more of a perfectionist's tool rather than a practical one although I’m sure Daniel will disagree with me on that!

To make these websites we’re going to be using Dreamweaver although technically you can code most text editors, for example when I first started out I used Notepad before moving onto Dreamweaver about a year later. Dreamweaver has a few time saving features such as the design view and a user interface instead of just the command line.

It was really interesting lecture, I have to say that Daniel has convinced me to use XHTML and CSS in my future web projects instead of just HTML on its own although I can’t see myself validating just yet!

The tutorial served as an introduction to Dreamweaver, XHTML and CSS.

First we created a new HTML file which was saved in the area of our web space. Before we created this page we first created a new website under the manage sites function, something completely new to me. We then made a series of changes to the page experimenting with different text properties. Next we experimented using the HTML for presentational lookup, then CSS within the HTML and then CSS as a standalone file like it should be done. All our changes could be viewed directly on the internet since the files were saved directly to our web space.

While for some people this stuff is probably new, because I’ve been doing it for so long it kind of felt like going back to counting to ten after learning trigonometry but I guess the it serves as a nice break from the course’s otherwise reasonably difficult work. I hope we go into some of the more advanced techniques, although I somehow doubt we will.

For my independent reading I’ve got a series of articles about XHTML and CSS.