Reading Notes for Week 8

W3schools HTML Tutorial


A good, practical, hands-on guide to using HTML to design a webpage. Includes may examples of common tags, elements and attributes.
Important was their note on how to look at the source code of other websites, and the important of borrowing and learning from the work of other's.

The one thing I thought was quite dated was their inclusion of how to encode tables and frames in html, especially with the advent of CSS for controlling page layout, and especially since the tutorial goes on to explain how HTML 4.0 and style sheets have made formatting webpages much easier, and more practical for content heavy webpages.

HTML Cheatsheet
Excellent reference for HTML for non-designers. Sometimes it's much easier to just edit html directly, rather than fiddling with sometimes uneven web-based editting applications. It's good to have options and not have to always rely on web designers.

W3Schools CSS Tutorial
Again, another good solid, but basic, introduction and overview of what CSS is and how to apply CSS to websites. The emphasis with CSS is on defining global properties for different HTML tags, properties which can be used to define single webpages, or entire websites. It also includes an interesting but important caveat against designing webpages for Internet Explorer.

Beyond HTML
The article details a case study of how HTML and CSS alone are not enough of a backbone to run a mature, content heavy website meant to serve the needs of a library and library patrons. The article discusses the options presented for developing structured websites with distinct control over content and format. Discussed are usage of Content Management Systems, different options for contracting the initial web development, and different options for control over site content.
The article goes into specific detail over decisions and development of how the Georgia State University Library's website was ultimately implemented, including the design of their MySQL database for the implementation of their CMS.
An interesting afterthough was placed in their conclusion, alluding to how the website could ultimately be tailored to the "remix-culture," which I assume the writer's of the article took as their buzzword to mean the library's website would ultimately be a more Web 2.0/user-oriented webspace for patrons to tailor the website to specifically fit their needs.