week 3

This week's assignment made a little more sense than last week's. We are focusing on semantic naming conventions as well as semantic markups, to make your code and page(s) descriptive for both users and machines as well. As readers and such work through a page, certain decisions are made depending on what the reader/user encounters.

The homework over this last week had us completing a site redesign, create a tutorial to describe the CSS Box Model, and utilize semantic naming for our CSS to allow us to do an exercise where we swap style sheets with other students. This worked well as long as the other students followed the same naming conventions. This exercise is very similar to what CSS ZenGarden allows. This was cool as first it worked. It was also cool because it was a visual example of the many different ways that there are to achieve a desired goal. The CSS pages that I tested with my site were all successful and also made the page appear very differently, while keeping the content and necessary elements readable and displaying in the right order.

I figured out that "position absolute" can be utilized with "float" to force the alignment of elements in my page. I had previously had a problem with the visual elements gradually forcing themselves out of whack.

One of the things that I enjoyed from this week's class is that we saw various examples of how other people designed their pages and even more so their navigation. The different options for navigation are very exciting as now I'm learning to create nav that is minimal (code-wise) and loads very quickly for a user. Also, since we aren't using images text readers or PDAs can view the page with less trouble.

Another topic covered was "compound xhtml". This basically means that you can start grouping elements within elements and they all have a dependency to each other. You have "parent" elements, "child elements", and even "sibling elements".

The first week's assignment was pretty difficult. We had to redesign an already created web page that made use of tables, even for non-statistical data. I've gone and changed these tables to DIVs but am having a problem with formatting. Each subsequent DIV pushed a little further out of alignment, causing all data to eventually shift over. Another issue that I encountered was with the header, or branding, section of the page. The colored bar pushes up instead of staying in a static position.

The first roadblock that I ran into was getting the colored boxes to position correctly, and that was finally accomplished by using the "float" property. I needed to create a small box for text, then a small divider, and then finally a larger box of the same height but whose width goes to the end of the page. Quite frustrating until I came across the "float" property. From there I was able to create the correct DIVs for the content, but that is when I ran into the issue of the formatting progressively pushing further out of alignment.

After seeing some examples from a couple of other students I think there are some things that I can change to try and address this formatting. My feelings are that once I can force everything to align correctly the remainder of the page should be fairly simple to finish off.

My plan of attack on this is to get the page displaying as I would like, clean up the code (and try to keep as small as possible), and then finally validating to XHTML strict standards. I feel like I understand how CSS works but now need to learn the finer details that will allow me to force the page to display exactly as I'm intending.

Day 1

I've started this blog as a requirement for my Intermediate Web Design class. My very first concern would be the continued development of my CSS skills and then I would be interested in growing my skills in multimedia elements to be incorporated into my sites.