Course Description
This is a course on the technical aspects of web site construction. You should already be familiar with web pages and web sites from your everyday life, and you probably have developed your own page or pages one way or another before taking this course. In this course, you will learn how to use “best practices” to build web pages that work well for as many of your web site’s visitors as possible.
In the process of learning how web pages work, you will learn how web servers , web browsers , client-side scripts , and server-side scripts all interact to produce what people encounter when they use the Web. But most of all, the course covers writing code to produce web pages: XHTML and CSS.
Using best practices for web design means generating pages that are clear, attractive, and easy to use regardless of whether they are accessed by a traditional desk-top or laptop computer, a high-resolution cell phone like the iPhone, a conventional low-resolution phone, or even a “screen reader” that speaks the content of the page for visually impaired visitors. Ultimately, all these issues reduce to the matter of working with web standards.
The two main standards covered in the course are the XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The course will also introduce the use of JavaScript (also known as ECMAScript) to create dynamic effects based on the W3C Document Object Model, DOM. In addition, we will also look at the concepts of client-side scripting using PHP.
You will have access to laboratory facilities in the department that provide complete control over the web server (Apache) as well as development tools, including Dreamweaver one of the most popular web development programs available. But this is not a “Dreamweaver Course”. Rather, you will learn to use subsets of Dreamweaver’s extensive range of features to manage a web site and to write XHTML and CSS code. For now, the laboratory version of Dreamweaver is one version “old;” the link in this paragraph is to the product page for the current version.
The textbook for the course is HTML Dog: The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML & CSS by Patrick Griffiths, published by New Riders (Peachpit Press) in 2007. The ISBN is 0-321-31139-6. Before you start reading the book, be sure to go through my list of typographical errors and write the corrections into your copy of the book. The author of the book has a web site with a lot of good tutorial material on the topics covered in this course.
Your course grade will be based on a midterm exam, a final exam, and a series of homework assignments. The exams, which will count for approximately 90% of the course grade, will be based on the exercises and on lecture material. However, since the lectures will focus on the development of the exercises and final project, the course will be largely project-oriented rather than theoretical.