meets Tuesday and Thursday from 0800-0915
office hours in Manning 112
Class Schedule
10 Jan | intro
15 Jan | clients
17 Jan | servers
22 Jan | networks
24 Jan | basics lab
29 Jan | structural layer
31 Jan |
presentational layer |
in practice |
02.02 |
planning |
next session
05 Feb | working with layers
07 Feb | behavior layer
12 Feb | images & design
14 Feb | website lab
19 Feb | document markup
21 Feb | tools that read markup
26 Feb | document markup lab
28 Feb | spreadsheets
05 Mar | formulas & functions
07 Mar | data display
19 Mar | database tools
21 Mar | spreadsheets lab
26 Mar | relational databases
28 Mar | tables
02 Apr | relationships
04 Apr | input & output
09 Apr | SQL
11 Apr | complex queries
16 Apr | databases lab
18 Apr | presentation design
23 Apr | presentation delivery
25 Apr | presentation lab
30 Apr | 0800-1100 | final in class presentation
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"Presentational" means the rules that define the visual aspects of how a web document is displayed on a computer monitor.
We will define "presentation" as meaning the visual aspects of how a web document is displayed on a computer monitor. If you create a web page, it will display as you instructed it to display, even if you inadvertently instructed it to display as someone else instructed it.
To be a bit more clear,
each HTML tag has to display in some fashion.
and a browser looks for instructions telling it how to display the tag.
If it finds none, it will display the element according to the browser's own display rules
For example, this page shows how several basic tags display when the page provides no specific instructions telling it what to do. In this case, the browser defaults to its own set of display rules.
Here is the same page using a set of display rules created by the page author and here is the same page using a set of display rules created by another individual. Toggle back and forth to see the difference.
These display rules can be applied to one or more pages and then any change made to the rules will apply to all pages linked to the rules.
W3Schools has a similar example.
If you right click and open the image in a new tab, you can see how the sidebar is a <div> element, with specific CSS instructions telling it how to display.
Greater control over how your type displays; you can be explicit in your definitions
One edit, multiple simultaneous corrections; really useful in a large site
You need only create a link to a single list of rules, rather than recreate the rules in each page you create.
Let's go back and look at our MSWord-created page for a comparison. It has all the display rules for all the possible tags embedded in the page file.
Though it is easier to control the placing of objects on a web page using visual tools such as tables, such tables are not always useful for all users.
CSS guidelines allow you to build pages that are accessible by a far wider span of potential users.
Mixing the rules about what an object means and how it should look on a single page is a thing of the past.
Even though current browsers still support such activities, eventually they will drop this ability and all pages will need to conform to the CSS standard
You will follow CSS rules for your task 02, so it would be a good idea to get used to them now
The CSS3 specification is the latest complete standard for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS3 is completely backwards-compatible with earlier versions of CSS.