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".