- Prior to the mass use of the Internet by the general population, who principally used the Internet and for what purpose?
- What was the first WYSIWYG web browser? Made by whom?
- Why was Netscape perceived as a threat by Microsoft?
- Describe the meeting between the developers of Netscape and Microsoft. How did Microsoft go about bringing down Netscape?
- Why was an anti-trust lawsuit brought against Microsoft?
- What were the long term effects of the anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft?
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Download - Episode 1 - Browser Wars
Based on "Browser Wars," Episode 1 of the series Download: The True Story of the Internet, answer the following questions:
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Web Design Pro Tips
Based on the article below and additional research on your part on the Internet, what most one consider in planning a website? As someone just learning about web design, what suprises you the most? What questions do you have as we begin to learn HTML and/or what do you want to be able to do/create?
Adapted from 20 Pro Tips by .net Magazine:
The difference between a good web designer and a great one is the ability to know how to take short cuts and save time without compromising the quality of work. Pixelsurgeon’s Jason Arber has put together 20 top tips and tricks you should be using to give your work that all-important professional edge
1. Planning
When you’re itching to get started, it’s easy to overlook the most obvious step: planning. Whether it’s drawing wireframes and site diagrams in OmniGraffle or Visio, or even on a scrap of paper, you’ll save time by having an overview of your design at the site and page level before you start building. Obvious errors can be detected and solved before it’s too late to go back and it makes explaining your ideas to clients and colleagues a lot simpler than waving your hands in the air.
2. Do it by hand
Although there are some excellent tools around for building web sites, such as Adobe GoLive and Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Dreamweaver, professional code monkeys prefer to code by hand. Are they crazy masochists? Quite possibly.
There’s only one way to learn HTML, and that’s to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with some actual code. But fear not: HTML has one of the easiest learning curves you’ll ever come across and you can create a basic web page with only a couple of lines. Writing code by hand also ensures that you write the leanest code possible, which is the ultimate aim of all HTML geeks.
Don’t throw out that copy of GoLive or Dreamweaver just yet. Both applications have excellent code writing environments, and have useful features, such as collapsable blocks of code and split views so you can code and see the results at the same time. If you want to try the code-only route, then any text editor that can save in the basic .txt format should do, but Mac users might want to check out Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit, and Windows users should give the freeware AceHTML editor from Visicome Media a whirl.
5. Commenting
When you come back to a site that you designed months ago, there’s nothing worse than trying to figure out what you did and attempting to untangle a spaghetti of code. Do yourself (and anyone else who wants to check out your code) a favour by putting comments in your HTML. Comments might add anything from a few bytes to a kilobyte or two to your page, but the time savings are invaluable.
Commenting also encourages you to keep your code tidy by breaking it into logical chunks. Some coders even use comments to create a table of contents for the page, which is only visible in code view.
Be aware that HTML and CSS use two different kinds of commenting, so you may want to learn the difference.
/* CSS comments are enclosed by a forward slash and an asterisk. */
10. Test, test and test again
While Internet Explorer still dominates the browser market by a huge percentage, its lead is being gradually eroded by other browsers such as Firefox and Opera. There are also plenty of people out there still using archaic browsers like pre-Mozilla versions of Netscape.
It’s virtually impossible to design great-looking web sites that work in all browser versions, so it’s best to decide which browsers you’ll support. Mozilla-based browsers, WebKit-based browsers (such as Apple’s Safari), KHTML-based browsers (such as Konqueror), Opera and Internet Explorer versions four and higher are generally considered a safe benchmark. However, you should still be a good net citizen by ensuring that your code degrades gracefully, so that even unsupported browsers can experience your site – even in a limited form (see tip 14).
17. Wrapping text around images
For a quick and dirty way of wrapping text around images, use the image’s align attribute to push it to the left or right. Rather than jump below the image, text should now flow along the edge.
18. Universal character sets
Character sets are an important part of a web page’s definition, but they’re probably the least understood component. Character sets, which are defined in a web page’s invisible head section, tell the browser what method is being used to encode the characters. A charset ISO Latin 1 (also known as ISO 8859-1) will render the code it finds using a basic Western alphabet, but a charset of Shift JIS will attempt to render any characters it finds as Japanese.
19. Print styles
When people print web pages, often they’re not interested in your flashy graphics: they just want a simplified version of the page.
20. Learn from others
Finally, a quick and simple tip: learn from great sites built by others. Any site’s HTML is easily accessible by viewing a page’s source code. See how others have done things and apply their methods to your own work.
Adapted from 20 Pro Tips by .net Magazine:
The difference between a good web designer and a great one is the ability to know how to take short cuts and save time without compromising the quality of work. Pixelsurgeon’s Jason Arber has put together 20 top tips and tricks you should be using to give your work that all-important professional edge
1. Planning
When you’re itching to get started, it’s easy to overlook the most obvious step: planning. Whether it’s drawing wireframes and site diagrams in OmniGraffle or Visio, or even on a scrap of paper, you’ll save time by having an overview of your design at the site and page level before you start building. Obvious errors can be detected and solved before it’s too late to go back and it makes explaining your ideas to clients and colleagues a lot simpler than waving your hands in the air.
2. Do it by hand
Although there are some excellent tools around for building web sites, such as Adobe GoLive and Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Dreamweaver, professional code monkeys prefer to code by hand. Are they crazy masochists? Quite possibly.
There’s only one way to learn HTML, and that’s to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with some actual code. But fear not: HTML has one of the easiest learning curves you’ll ever come across and you can create a basic web page with only a couple of lines. Writing code by hand also ensures that you write the leanest code possible, which is the ultimate aim of all HTML geeks.
Don’t throw out that copy of GoLive or Dreamweaver just yet. Both applications have excellent code writing environments, and have useful features, such as collapsable blocks of code and split views so you can code and see the results at the same time. If you want to try the code-only route, then any text editor that can save in the basic .txt format should do, but Mac users might want to check out Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit, and Windows users should give the freeware AceHTML editor from Visicome Media a whirl.
5. Commenting
When you come back to a site that you designed months ago, there’s nothing worse than trying to figure out what you did and attempting to untangle a spaghetti of code. Do yourself (and anyone else who wants to check out your code) a favour by putting comments in your HTML. Comments might add anything from a few bytes to a kilobyte or two to your page, but the time savings are invaluable.
Commenting also encourages you to keep your code tidy by breaking it into logical chunks. Some coders even use comments to create a table of contents for the page, which is only visible in code view.
Be aware that HTML and CSS use two different kinds of commenting, so you may want to learn the difference.
/* CSS comments are enclosed by a forward slash and an asterisk. */
10. Test, test and test again
While Internet Explorer still dominates the browser market by a huge percentage, its lead is being gradually eroded by other browsers such as Firefox and Opera. There are also plenty of people out there still using archaic browsers like pre-Mozilla versions of Netscape.
It’s virtually impossible to design great-looking web sites that work in all browser versions, so it’s best to decide which browsers you’ll support. Mozilla-based browsers, WebKit-based browsers (such as Apple’s Safari), KHTML-based browsers (such as Konqueror), Opera and Internet Explorer versions four and higher are generally considered a safe benchmark. However, you should still be a good net citizen by ensuring that your code degrades gracefully, so that even unsupported browsers can experience your site – even in a limited form (see tip 14).
17. Wrapping text around images
For a quick and dirty way of wrapping text around images, use the image’s align attribute to push it to the left or right. Rather than jump below the image, text should now flow along the edge.
18. Universal character sets
Character sets are an important part of a web page’s definition, but they’re probably the least understood component. Character sets, which are defined in a web page’s invisible head section, tell the browser what method is being used to encode the characters. A charset ISO Latin 1 (also known as ISO 8859-1) will render the code it finds using a basic Western alphabet, but a charset of Shift JIS will attempt to render any characters it finds as Japanese.
19. Print styles
When people print web pages, often they’re not interested in your flashy graphics: they just want a simplified version of the page.
20. Learn from others
Finally, a quick and simple tip: learn from great sites built by others. Any site’s HTML is easily accessible by viewing a page’s source code. See how others have done things and apply their methods to your own work.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
