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 asECMAScript) 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.
Laboratory Facilities
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 laboratory is an “open laboratory.” That means that you can use the lab any time the college is open, and at all times of the day and night from the internet. See the laboratory information page for details.
There are no scheduled times when the class meets in the lab. Rather, you are to use it for doing your assignments for the course on your own time outside of class.
Textbook
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.
There will also be reading assignments from tutorial material available on the web
Grading
Your course grade will be based on a midterm exam, a final exam, and a series of homework assignments. The actual weights of the exams and assignments vary from semester to semester, but typical values are 40% for the midterm exam, 45% for the final exam, and the remaining 15% for the homework assignments. Although the assignments themselves count relatively little, the exams are based to a great extent on the concepts and techniques used to complete the assignments. Furthermore, the classroom presentations and the reading assignments are both closely integrated with the homework assignments.
The homework assignments consist of projects and exercises that you will do using the laboratory facilities. It is perfectly all right for you to get help from your classmates or any other source while you are working on the assignments, but even if you work with someone else, each of you is to submit his/her own assignment. Each assignment that you submit will be graded on an “ok” or “not ok” basis, with each “ok” worth 2 points and each “not ok” worth 1 point. The sum of your assignment scores will be used to compute your assignment score for the course. For example, if there were ten assignments, and assignments counted 15% of the course grade, each “ok” would count 1.5 points towards your course average.
You can get a grade of “not ok” for submitting an assignment even if it is incomplete or late. This is worth doing because even a “not ok” adds approximately one point to your course average.
Sometimes it is possible to get a score of “good” on an assignment, which counts as 3 points. This extra credit can be used to offset a “not ok” on another assignment, or even to raise your homework grade for the course above 100%.
You will receive no credit for homework assignments submitted more than one week after the due date.
The bottom line is that the assignments are designed to prepare you for the exams. Even if you get someone to help you do them, be sure you actually know exactly how to do them yourself so you will be prepared for the exams, which will count for the very largest part of the course grade.