Week 8 reading notes

W3schools HTML Tutorial
(http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/html_intro.asp)

This was a tutorial about the basics of HTML and how websites are built using it. It explained everything step by step and was clearly aimed toward beginners, so I was able to get a lot out of it. As has been the case with past readings, a lot of the content I knew already but had a hard time putting together in my head. I knew the absolute basics of HTML from posting in blogs and things before, but this tutorial brought it all together in terms I was able to grasp quickly. I thought it tended to repeat itself a little, but overall it seems like a really good resource for beginning to build webpages, and I’ll probably be using it sometime soon in the future.

HTML Cheat Sheet
(http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/reference/html_cheatsheet/)

I got a 404 Error when I tried to view this page, and nothing came up when I tried the search feature for the website, so I was never able to view it.

W3 School Cascading Style Sheet Tutorial
(http://www.w3schools.com/css/)

I know a lot less about CSS than about basic HTML, so here are some notes (I put spaces between tags so it wouldn't show up in Blogger):

“What is CSS?
• CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets
• Styles define how to display HTML elements
• Styles were added to HTML 4.0 to solve a problem
• External Style Sheets can save a lot of work
• External Style Sheets are stored in CSS files

Styles Solved a Big Problem
• HTML was never intended to contain tags for formatting a document.
• HTML was intended to define the content of a document, like:
o < h1 > This is a heading < /h1 >
o < p > This is a paragraph. < /p >
• When tags like < span >, and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2 specification, it started a nightmare for web developers. Development of large web sites, where fonts and color information were added to every single page, became a long and expensive process.
• To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created CSS.
• In HTML 4.0, all formatting could be removed from the HTML document, and stored in a separate CSS file.
• All browsers support CSS today.

CSS defines HOW HTML elements are to be displayed.

Styles are normally saved in external .css files. External style sheets enable you to change the appearance and layout of all the pages in a Web site, just by editing one single file!”

This seemed a lot more complicated and harder for me to understand, but it was interesting to learn how it came about as a solution for difficulties with newer versions of HTML. This was the same kind of step-by-step tutorial as the HTML one, using examples and giving you the opportunity to try each step of the process after every example.