The Year of Languages

2005: The Year of Languages
– American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. “The limits of your language are the limits of your world.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

“To know another language is to have a second soul.” – Charlemagne

“Learning a language is more than just learning words in the new language. It’s also learning the culture of the people, understanding their dreams, their spirit, and their values. When you learn another language, you can see the world with a whole new set of eyes.” – Anu Garg

Publication Day for Integrated HTML and CSS

Integrated HTML and CSS: A Smarter, Faster Way to Learn by Virginia DeBoltCelebration time! Today is the eagerly awaited publication day for Integrated HTML and CSS: A Smarter, Faster Way to Learn. I wrote the book based on several years of teaching HTML and CSS at the college level.

The other books available for teaching HTML generally teach you all about HTML first and all about CSS later. I believe that the two go hand-in-hand and should be learned at the same time. There are several reasons I chose this approach:

  • Almost the instant that students manage to get one word to appear on a web page, they start demanding to know how to make it look better: how to change the color or the font or the placement. The only way to meet those demands with standards-based code is by using CSS.
  • Having the awareness of what you intend to do with CSS as you create XHTML helps you write web pages that are CSS-ready. It helps you structure your pages with various hooks, handles, and holders meant for styling with CSS.
  • Learning to write XHTML with CSS in mind helps you design pages that work in modern browsers, download quickly, are accessible, and hold up well over time. These are design skills that help students when they reach the job market.

This book is for beginners in HTML and CSS, or for people who already know HTML but are beginners at CSS. My great hope for the book is that teachers and students will find it valuable.

Review: Creating a Web Page in Dreamweaver

Creating a Web Page in DreamweaverCreating a Web Page in Dreamweaver is the second Visual QuickProject I’ve seen from Peachpit Press. The author is Nolan Hester. Like the HTML Visual QuickProject I reviewed earlier, this book is stripped down to 125 pages, uses visuals as much as text to get the point across, and would enable a beginner to create a set of linked pages and get them up on the web.

These Visual QuickProjects aren’t meant to create power users, so they would not be suitable for a full semester text. They would be perfect for someone who simply wants a basic, non-commercial page, or for a class of only a few hours in a situation like continuing ed. I’ve seen high school courses where the students are expected to be exposed to Dreamweaver, some image editing program like Fireworks, Flash, a video editing program, and possibly even something like PowerPoint. These little books would be a good introduction to an application program in a class like that.

The QuickProject includes a few Dreamweaver interface basics, a few text formatting basics, images, tables, lists, links, library items, templates, and publication. The project uses CSS styles and CSS for layout with both external and embedded styles.

Visit Web Teacher to read any comments.