Day eleven: a research paper

Before beginning today's work, we'll talk more about XML files.

Here's a page of XML examples. Look at the ones in the top group. You can see that their structure is just like HTML, but where HTML is about appearance, XML is about content. Any programmer can write a programs to use XML-formatted content.

To learn more, try keywords "XML tutorial," "XML examples," etc. in a search engine.

Microsoft has learned from history and published a great deal of description of how it uses XML in Office 2007. This will make it possible for Microsoft's rivals to read and write Office 2007 documents.

Our work for the day: formatting a research paper. See projects 6B, beginning on page 354, and 6-Oh, beginning on page 406. E-mail me the result of 6-Oh when you have finished it.

Here is a very interesting page on evolving citation practices for electronic resources in APA style. The APA handout for a sample paper is at the bottom of this page.

Want to try Office 2007 at home? free 60-day trial

Want to stick with Office 2003, but need to read 2007 files? free download

Day ten: Word in Office 2007

Today, an introduction to the latest upgrade to Microsoft Office 2007 application Word.

Download this file for initial practice.

Items to note:

• different interface with




• Office button for big filing functions


• ribbon with tabs




• XML file format


• lots of online extras

Take time to check out the interface. We'll do something kind of off-the-wall to check out the XML file format.

Assignment for the day: Project 5G (find it at the book's web site). Carry out the tasks and e-mail me the result.

Day nine: stylesheets

Here is a stylesheet template which you can download and change on your onw computer. Our textbook's summary of CSS, or cascading stylesheet, properties begins on page 179.

Assignment for the day: Change your one-hour biography so that its appearance is controlled by a stylesheet embedded in the HTML page.

Properties that you should control in your stylesheet:

• background color


• text color


• margins


• headline style


• fonts

Web bibliography assignment

Here's the scoop. Due Friday, October 5!

Making a color chart

Now that you have experience in making an HTML table, you could make your own color chart, like this one.

Day 8: formatting HTML with tables

In old-school HTML, our only tool for controlling layout on the screen was to use rectangular tables and tables within tables. The method is crude and cumbersome, but effective. Some work with tables will make you salivate when we get to stylesheets, next meeting.

To see today's handout, click here.

References in the book:

• Chapter 3 generally


• simple examples, beginning page 83




• table, tr, td tags


• align, border, bordercolor attributes


• cellspacing, cellpadding attributes


• bgcolor attribute


• colspan, rowspan attribute

On pages 97, 100, and 110 you can see some sample formats. Look at some of your favorite webpages for rectangular tables.

Assignment for today: Make four (4!) webpages. Use the drawings on the handout for models. Fill the cells of the table with pleasing colors, chosen from combinations that you find using the color chooser. When you have finished all four, show them to me.

How to do a clickable picture

Here's my Rasta-girl cycling page with clickable pictures.

How to do a clickable pic:

<a href="THE_LINK"><img src="FILENAME_FOR_PICTURE"></a>

if the picture is in your folder; or

<a href="THE_LINK"><img src="LINK_TO_A_PICTURE"></a>

if the picture is on a web site.

Note that in either case, the picture has a picture-type lastname, such as .jpg, .gif, etc.

Day seven: finish one-hour biographies!!

"I uploaded it, but it's not showing!"

This is usually because you're looking at something other than what you uploaded. It takes care and practice to handle pathnames correctly!

Today we will minimize problems by doing development locally. Do all your work on the desktop until it's finished, then upload at the end.

Here's a PDF of the day's handout.

And send me the URL at the end of the class meeting!

Day six: one-hour biography

 

Tasks for the day:

[1] Undo the automatic log-in in WS_FTP. We don't want the whole world trashing your web space.

[2] Download this zip file with the latest, greatest quickHTML.html.

[3] Unzip the zip and use the daySix folder as the basis for today's work, which is...

[4] Your one-hour biography. Tell the world about yourself — or your fantasy self, as the case may be — and things that interest you in links and pictures. Conditions!

Minimum of six working links

Minimum of three pictures, which must be clickable

[5] Keep the file structure, with a folder daySix and your page and pictures within it.

[6] Important! You must e-mail me the link when you've finished.

Day six: readings in Felke-Morris

p 46: font tags

p 54: HTML validator at w3.org (we'll return to this)

p 72: absolute and relative links, same idea as absolute and relative pathnames

p 75: FAQ why won't my page load?

p 129: GIF, JPG, and PNG file types for pictures; note that you can Save As in Paint and other drawing/ painting/ photo processing programs

p 134: attributes of the <img /> tag for more efficient loading of your pictures

p 138: how to make a picture into a background for your web page

p 140: FAQ about images

p 150: free pictures to avoid copyright problems

p 157: color schemes

Color choosers

Here's another great color chooser. It's complex at first.

And the next is by default limited to the 216 "web-safe" colors.

The next one gives all the silly names and changes the background color of the page when you click on one of them. Please let me know if you find another one we should all see!

Take my slides, please!

Here's a PowerPoint presentation on writing web pages, summarizing much of what we've been talking about for the last few days. Kind of sketchy, but maybe useful to you!

In case you can't easily read PowerPoint where you are, here are note pages that you can print out and improve.

Your NVCC URL and ftp settings

Your NVCC web space has this address:

www.student.nvcc.edu/home/UserID

where UserID is your LAN ID.

The program we're using for ftp is WS_FTP.

Your ftp settings:

Profile name: (doesn't matter)
Host: www.student.nvcc.edu
UserID: nvstu\UserID

Day five

Your task for today is to create a web page with links and pictures. Do Page/ View Source on this page for an outline that you can save to your desktop. Be sure to Save As type HTML only. Saving otherwise invites grief!

Web-safe colors

Our author's web-safe color chart is a handsome one. This grouping from WebMonkey is also attractive.

110 day four: web pages!

Topics for the day:

• the Internet generally
  
• how web pages look under the hood
  
• edit-admire cycle
  
• student web pages at NVCC
  
• getting our files to the web
  
• edit-upload-admire cycle
  

Here is the text for our first web page:



<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>

<title>My First Web Page</title>

</head>

<body>

Hello World

</body>

</html>



(This is the text that appears on page 28 of the text.)

The author's interesting web site is at http://webdevfoundations.net/. Here's a link to all the files in the book.

The World Wide Web Consortium, at w3.org, provides this helpful start guide for HTML.

Here's a very simple web page that I wrote as a start page for beginners. Use View/Source!