Fundamentals of Internet Applications: Fall 2006 week 9: 11/15

Hi everybody, After several weeks of not being able to keep up with this blog, here is the entry I promised last night. I was happy the way last night's class turned out, even though I didn't get to everything I had planned. It was good to discover that many of you are fairly comfortable creating a simple table, even though it is true that a good portion of the class is still having a great deal of trouble with this. Therefore, I think the beginning of class was good practice, even though it took up more time than I had expected. Everything we do in class from here on out, all the classwork and all the homework, will be geared to producing your final project. There will be no mere exercises, or busy work, that you show to me each week, and then close and stash away in some hidden folder never to look at again. Frome here on out, everything I assign as homework, you will be able to use directly in the project you turn into me the last day of class. This week's homework is PART I of your final project. Therefore, if you do not do your homework, you're actually hurting the chance that your final project will receive an A or B. This final project consists of a small web-site of six (6) pages of content. This does not mean six html files, no, but six pages OF CONTENT. There may be other files that you will produce that do not contain any content (or very little), such as the frameset files I introduced last night, or the navigation file. The .html file that contains the menu navigation does not officially count as a page of your site even if the links are technically content.

TOPICS:
1. Final Project;
  - LINK Content Requirements;
  - LINK Technical Requirements;
  - LINK Design Requirements;
2. Classwork:
  1. Review:
    - LINK Creating a simple table;
    - LINK Modifying the table;
    - LINK Adding colspan;
    - LINK Adding CSS styles—using an embedded stylesheet for the background color, margins, and links.
  2. Introduce:
    - LINK Using CSS Class Selectors;
    - LINK Creating HTML Framesets;
    - LINK Using the Frame Tag;
HOMEWORK—Final Project, Part I: Starting this week, the homework for each class is part of the final project. It is not extraneous to what you will be required to do and what will be due the last day of class. If you produce your homework each week, you will be largely finished with the project well before it is due. Part I, due the next class (11/22/06⁙week 10), consists of two things:
- A Logo—Create a new logo for the site described below. This will be used on the intro page as well as at the top of every other page in the site. It must follow the same complimentary color scheme described just below.
- A Color Scheme—You must decide upon your color scheme for your site by Friday. This does not mean it cannot change somewhat over the course of your work during the next 5 weeks; but rather, it is meant as a initial design decision as a way for you to begin to determine the direction it will take. LINK View the CSS code of the following document at the above link. The code has directions within the CSS at the top instructing you what to do. The link takes you to the document you will use to demonstrate your color scheme to me. Once you have clicked on the link, choose view << source to see the code. All you need to look at is the top of the document in the CSS section. Please send me an email, or ask me before Friday's class if you are unclear what I want.
FINAL PROJECT: Democracy Now! website Re-Design The current Democracy Now! website is found here (LINK), and you should look through the site and familiarize yourself with its topic and mission. Knowing what the site is about is imperative to making design decisions for color and layout. Your project is to re-design the parts of the site detailed below.
1. CONTENT REQUIREMENTS:
  1. Page 1: INTRO PAGE—This page has no requirements other than to follow the general technical and design requirements for the entire site (see below: LINK). All it consists of is some sort of graphic introduction, an image, or flash animation, or whatever you prefer to introduce us to the site, and a link to the primary frameset (index) of the site. It contains NO OTHER CONTENT. But please make sure you follow your complimentary color scheme.
  2. Page 2: HEADLINES PAGE—This page includes all the headlines, summaries, images and captions which I will provide to you. If you wish to add any additional headlines and images to this page, please do so. The images and text required for this page will be given to you near the end of the term. We will save this page for last so that the headlines are as current as possible.
  3. Page 3: MAIN PAGE—This page must have the introductory text, About Democracy Now! that I will provide you, as well as a couple of images that I will also provide to you. Any other text or images that you find and wish to include is welcomed and encouraged; however, it must remain on the topic of the site. You must use all the information on the following two (2) pages in your main page found here: LINK (about) and here: LINK (history) The images required for this page are here: LINK
  4. Page 4: IMAGE GALLERY PAGE—This page must have ALL the images and caption text that I will provide you. There will be at least ten (10) images. Once again, please use additional images and captions for them if you wish. The images required for these pages are here: LINK and the captions for the images are here (you should note that the name of the image precedes the caption): LINK
  5. Page 5: FORM I PAGE—This page will consist of the first form of two that will be required for the site, the submit idea form. It must utilize all of the same form fields as the form found in the current site: LINK
  6. Page 6: FORM II PAGE—This page will consist of the second form of two that will be required for the site, the volunteer form. It must utilize ALL of the same form fields as the form found here: LINK
2. DESIGN REQUIREMENTS:
  1. Color Scheme—you must use what is known as a Complimentary Color Scheme. A complimentary color scheme is a two-color scheme, but it is basically a scheme in which the large majority of the site is done monochromatically. Monochromatic means one color. This means that you start off with a site that follows a monochromatic scheme, which means that everything is to be some tint or shade of the same color. If you choose blue as your color, then that means absolutely everything in the site must be some variation of blue, including images. If you wish to show color images, then make the images clickable to link to larger, full-color versions of them. Once you establish this primary color, then you select its compliment to use as an accent color, for times when you need to focus attention or when you require greater contrast. Therefore, if blue is the main color for most of your site, then you would use some version of its compliment, orange, as your accent color (blue & orange, red & green, and yellow & purple).
  2. Page Layout—you must use CSS and/or tables to lay out all pages in a pleasing way. If you are not certain how to do this, consult our past classes and me for assistance.
3. TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS:
  1. XHTML
    —ALL CODE for this site (other than for the frameset document must be typed using STRICT XHTML standards. This means the following:
    - that all tags and their attributes must be typed in lower case;
    - that all attribute values must be typed in quotes and with units;
    - that the DTD for strict XHTML must be typed at the top of the document;
    - that all empty tags must be typed with the slash at the end, such as with the <br/> tag;
    - that none of the deprecated inline tags are to be used, such as the <font>, <b>, <u>, or <i> tags;
    - and, in addition, that the <tbody> and the <thead> tags, as well as the height attribute for the <table> and <td> tags, are not permitted.
    If you are uncertain about something, you can consult the requirements at the w3schools site (LINK), or you may ask me.
  2. CSS—ALL STYLING must be done using CSS. We have used it extensively in this class, and further, as it is the standard in web-design, it is a requirement that this site use CSS for the styling of the page. All three levels of styles may be, and are encouraged to be used. Please consult me if you need additional assistance with this. You will be learning more and more about CSS as the term progresses.
Classwork—As usual, we started Wednesday's class with a review of a familiar topic. This time (again) it was HTML tables. This was the fifth week in a row that we have been working on tables, and I hope that fact alone indicates their importance to creating effective, and well-designed web-pages. I will not discuss the topic at much length this time, however, and instead will demonstrate with examples of code and the resulting tables. LINK Click here LINK and here for a more thorough introduction, discussion and demonstration on the topic of tables.
1. A Simple Table—We began the class be creating a simple table of three (3) rows with six (6) cells in each row:
  
  And here is the code for this table: <table border="1px" width="100%"> // below here is row 1 <tr> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> // below here is row 2 <tr> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> // below here is row 3 <tr> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> </table>
2. Modifying the Table—Next, I add a few attributes and some text to the table: <table border="1px" width="100%" cellspacing="0px;" cellpadding="3px"> // below here is row 1 <tr> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> // below here is row 2 <tr> <td> </td> <td align="center" valign="middle">one</td> <td align="center" valign="middle">two</td> <td align="center" valign="middle">three</td> <td align="center" valign="middle">four</td> <td> </td> </tr> // below here is row 3 <tr> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> </table>
  
  one two three four
3. Adding colspan—To complete the table modifications, I add the colspan attribute to rows 1 and 3, and I delete some cells as well from the same rows:
  
  one two three four
  
  <table border="1px" width="100%" cellspacing="0px;" cellpadding="3px"> // below here is row 1 <tr> <td colspan="6"> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> // below here is row 2 <tr> <td> </td> <td align="center" valign="middle">one</td> <td align="center" valign="middle">two</td> <td align="center" valign="middle">three</td> <td align="center" valign="middle">four</td> <td> </td> </tr> // below here is row 3 <tr> <td colspan="6"> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> </table>
4. Adding CSS Styles—To begin to design the page, I will add some styling to the page using an embedded stylesheet. Recall, that an embedded stylesheet are CSS styles that are defined within the HEAD SECTION of the document, between a pair of <style> tags. To see further discussion on the topic of CSS, please see last week's posting: <style type="text/css">  </style> Since we have styles for links, we are going to turn the text in the table, the words one, two, three, four into links. You can make them link to anything you want for now: <table border="1px" width="100%" cellspacing="0px;" cellpadding="3px"> // below here is row 1 <tr> <td colspan="6"> </td> </tr> // below here is row 2 <tr> <td> </td> <td align="center" valign="middle"> <a href="http://www.yahoo.com" target="_blank">one</a> </td> <td align="center" valign="middle"> <a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">two</a> </td> <td align="center" valign="middle"> <a href="http://www.msn.com" target="_blank">three</a> </td> <td align="center" valign="middle"> <a href="http://www.w3schools.com" target="_blank">four</a> </td> <td> </td> </tr> // below here is row 3 <tr> <td colspan="6"> </td> </tr> </table>
5. CSS Class Selectors—Using a CSS Class is a special way to attach styles to an element in a page of HTML. Let's review, a CSS style definition consists of three (3) basic terms: ¹selector {²property: ³value;} The selector determines to which HTML element the style will be applied, as in the following example: h1 {font-size:28pt;} In the above example, the selector is the h1. It selects, or indicates that the following styles are to be applied to all<h1> tags. The following two terms after the selector should be self-explanatory, they are the property of the tag being styled, font-size, and then the particular value or setting for that property, 28pt. Up to now, this is the only sort of style definition we have considered, those that match a particular HTML tag; however, there are selectors which may be used for any tag. This makes the style definition very flexible, as it can be applied as often or seldom as necessary. They are known as classes. and the selector, since it is not given a particular tag name such as body or h1, must have unique names. These names are preceded by a dot (.). .red {color:#ff0000; font-weight:bold;} Once created, the class is applied like all attributes are, and to any tag that is necessary, such as the two examples that follow: <p class="red">hello!</p> <td class="red">cell 1</td> With this understanding, we will create three (3) classes to be applied immediately to our table, one for each row. Later, we may use these classes again if we need to. <style type="text/css">  </style> These styles can then be applied to the table rows: <table border="0px" width="100%" cellspacing="0px;" cellpadding="3px"> // below here is row 1 <tr class="color1"> <td colspan="6"> </td> </tr> // below here is row 2 <tr class="menu"> <td> </td> <td align="center" valign="middle"> <a href="http://www.yahoo.com" target="_blank">one</a> </td> <td align="center" valign="middle"> <a href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">two</a> </td> <td align="center" valign="middle"> <a href="http://www.msn.com" target="_blank">three</a> </td> <td align="center" valign="middle"> <a href="http://www.w3schools.com" target="_blank">four</a> </td> <td> </td> </tr> // below here is row 3 <tr class="color2"> <td colspan="6"> </td> </tr> </table> This code produces the following results:
  
  one two three four
6. Framesets—In this week's class we saw the introduction of the issue of one of the final and more advanced issues of HTML, frames and framesets. Essentially, a frameset is a series of documents, held together by a frame , that work together to break apart the browser window into multiple browser window. In each window, or frame, a different web-document or web-site may be viewed. There is virtually no limit to the number of frames that may be contained within a frameset, as it depends on how many are programmed into the frameset document; however, design and function are first and foremost the constraints that should guide you when attempting to determine how many frames are necessary and practical. As mentioned, the guiding document is the frameset document: this document works much as a window frame. I do not mean the panes of glass, but rather the frame that binds the panes together. As it is merely a frame, this document, the frameset document, has no content. Furthermore, as it has no content, it has no body section. Instead, replacing the body section, it has a frameset section that sets up parameters of the frameset, exactly how many frames and what their orientation will be. Therefore, a frameset document starts out pretty much the same as an ordinary HTML document, but diverges with the second section: <html> <head> <title>frameset document</title> </head> <frameset> </frameset> </html> Above, you can see that the frameset section, instead of the body section, follows the head section instead in the document. This is where the browser window is carved up into frames. For horizontal frames, the attribute rows is used; and for vertical frames, the attribute cols is used. <frameset cols="150px, *"> In the above frameset tag, a two-frame frameset is created, where the first frame (the first column) is 150 pixels wide, and the second one, indicated by the asterisk, is whatever remains of the open browser window. To complete the frameset, however, there must be a <frame/> tag for each frame. Since there are two measurements (150, *) in the above setup there must also be two frame tags. <html> <head> <title>frameset document</title> </head> <frameset cols="150px, *"> <frame/> <frame/> </frameset> </html> The <frame/> tags are empty tags, but there are nonetheless still two tags, one for each frame in the frameset. Furthermore, each must be accompanied with the src attribute in order to place another document within the frameset: <frame src="nav.html"/> <frame src="content.html"/> In this example, another document named nav.html will appear in the first frame of the frameset, and another named content.html will appear in the second frame. To remove the borders between frames, the <frameset> tag require two additional attributes and values: frameborder="no" border="0px". If we change the orientation of our frames to rows (horizontal), and rename our original document above nav.html (the one with the table background colors above of red and orange), we can start to create our first frameset document. <html> <head> <title>frameset document</title> </head> <frameset rows="150px, *" frameborder="no" border="0px"> <frame src="nav.html" name="nav"/> <frame src="content.html" name="content"/> </frameset> </html> You should notice above, that in addition to the attributes regulating the border, and indicating the source files for the frames, that there is a name attribute for each frame. There is an important reason for giving names to frames, particularly the frame where the primary content of the website will go. Primary content here refers to those documents that contain most of the content of the site, the images and text, as opposed to the document that contains the navigation, or the frameset document itself. This is so that the frame can be targeted. This can be done with links, for example, so that linked documents can be targeted to open up into a particular frame. LINK In our first document, we created a menu of links. These links targeted a value, "_blank", which targets a new browser window, opens up the document in a new blank window. If, however, the value we choose is the name of one of our frames in the frameset document, content for example, instead of opening up in a separate new browser window, the documents will open up in another window of our frameset. Our link would then look like so: <a href="one.html" target="content">one</a>

Fundamentals of Internet Applications

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Fall 2006

week 9: 11/15

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