Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Screensaver tackles spam websites: “Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.
Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out.
The net firm estimates that if enough people sign up and download the tool, spammers could end up paying to send out terabytes of data.”
Sometimes Internet Explorer adds unwanted whitespace and separates list items in unwanted ways. The way to fix this is to remove all the whitespace from the list items in the code. There are two options for how to do this.
The first way is to “break” the closing list item tag like this:
<ul>
<li>list text</li
><li>list text</li
><li>list text</li
></ul>
The second method is to run all the list items together in one string like this:
<ul>
<li>list text</li><li>list text</li><li>list text</li>
</ul>
Additional note: there is information about the cause and cure for this problem at the CSS Creator Forum that doesn’t involve writing mangled HTML code.
Julian Rickards is the author of this volume in the Essentials for Design series published by Pearson Prentice Hall. I looked at Level One. There is also a Level Two book for Dreamweaver MX 2004 in the same series. Neither book is available yet, although the Level Two book is mentioned on amazon.com. Unfortunately, neither the Level One book nor amazon.com have a table of contents for Level Two. I wish I could see the contents for the next level, because that would make a difference in whether or not I would recommend teaching with this book.
I’ve been doing some writing for the Fireworks MX 2004 book in this series—just some suplemental materials, not the text. Because of that, I’ve looked really closely at the Fireworks book, too. The Fireworks book seems quite good to me, even though I’ve never taught Fireworks and don’t have so many opinions about how it should be taught as I do where Dreamweaver is concerned.
Pearson Prentice Hall is going all out to give teachers everything they could possibly need with this series. There are objectives for each lesson, extensive opportunities for evaluation and reinforcement, hands-on-projects in every chapter, and creative portfolio development for each project. Teachers are given a reference guide to the files on the CD, an Instructor’s Manual, and PowerPoint slides for each project. There is a test generating program and built-in integration with WebCT and Blackboard (with CourseCompass if wanted) and a training and assessment product called Train & Assess IT. The Essentials for Design series includes books for Illustrator CS, InDesign CS, Photoshop CS, Premiere Pro, QuarkXPress 6, XHTML, JavaScript, Dreamweaver MX 2004, Fireworks MX 2004, and Flash MX 2004.
To get specific about Essentials for Design: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004, Level One, I both liked and didn’t like it. The book does a fine job of getting students off to a good start with Dreamweaver MX 2004 and many of the exercises and explanations are excellent.
The thing that bothers me as an advocate of integrating the CSS instruction into the development of everything else being taught is that much of the CSS seems to have been put off to Level Two. At least I hope things like exporting embedded style sheets to external CSS files and setting up font presention choices in the body style are covered in Level Two. I do like the fact that CSS is not ignored until the last minute, as in some books. Students begin writing styles using the Property Inspector very early in the book, but Level One never gets beyond what happens automatically via the Property Inspector. In the Tables chapter, it mentions that borders exist in CSS, but doesn’t explain how to use them. In the Frames chapter (which is top-notch at explaining how to make frames accessible!) it uses the Property inspector to embed styles in each individual document in the framed site without mentioning how much time and code could be saved with an external stylesheet. In the Images chapter (also very good from an overall standpoint) students use align attributes rather than learning about float.
Aside from my usual criticism about the lack of CSS integration from the first moment, this is a good book. I would not teach it without Level Two, whatever Level Two may contain, but it is a good start. Teachers who aren’t experts in Dreamweaver or aren’t familiar what happens in Code View will be well served by the exercises, the evaluation materials, and the creative projects. High school teachers may love it for the help with objectives, evaluation and hands-on project ideas, while college teachers may love it for the integration with WebCT and Blackboard.
Suckerfish Dropdowns – HTML Dog: “The original Suckerfish Dropdowns article published in A List Apart proved to be a popular way of implementing lightweight, accessible CSS-based dropdown menus that accommodated Internet Explorer by mimicking the :hover pseudo-class.
Well now they’re back and they’re more accessible, even lighter in weight (just 12 lines of JavaScript), have greater compatibility (they now work in Opera and Safari without a hack in sight) and can have multiple-levels.”
A lot of people have had problems with the Son of Suckerfish dropdowns, so perhaps this will be a big improvement. There are also pure CSS dropdowns in Eric Meyer’s More Eric Meyer on CSS and Project Seven offers some well tested drop down menus as well.
I’m grateful for many things on this Thanksgiving Day: most importantly the family and friends that fill my life. I’m thankful to be in good health and able to do for myself those simple tasks that consititute everyday life.
It’s probably completely weird of me, but I’m thankful for something that most people don’t care about at all: HTML and CSS. Not the book I’ve got coming out in December (although I am certainly thankful about that) but the subject of HTML and CSS as a fascinating mental pursuit. I don’t know what it is that makes people become hooked on a topic to the point that they want to endlessly know more and more about it. For some people its coin collecting, or baseball stats, or salsa dancing. For me, its “View Source” and code views. I’m not a computer geek, I don’t understand programming. My background is in education and writing. But somehow this HTML and CSS thing got my full attention and I’ve been having a ball with it for several years.
There’s a TV show called “It’s Good to Be…” where they dissect how good it is to be whoever because they make a lot of money. When I watch it I think about things like Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson: a poem about a rich and admired man who commits suicide. It’s only money, people.
It’s good to be me today: good to have people I love who care about me in return, to be American and free, to be healthy, and to have a never ending source of interest in HTML and CSS.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0: “The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) as a Recommendation in May 1999. This Working Draft for version 2.0 builds on WCAG 1.0. It has the same aim: to explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities and to define target levels of accessibility. Incorporating feedback on WCAG 1.0, this Working Draft of version 2.0 focuses on guidelines. It attempts to apply guidelines to a wider range of technologies and to use wording that may be understood by a more varied audience.”
Thanks to Sherry Holdridge, a freelance search engine guru, for this collection of resources on how to get started making your site perform well with the search engines.