This week we will start with CSS. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a way of defining the appearance of a web page. The style sheet is a text files that contains instructions on how your web page should be displayed. The instructions are communicated through properties and values that tell the web page exactly how certain elements should be displayed.
To prepare for the the material we will be covering, please take a look at the following articles
- How to Size Text in CSS by Richard Rutter
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/howtosizetextincss
- CSS Basics (This is essentially a book- skim it thoughtfully)
http://www.cssbasics.com/ - CSS Design: Taming a List by Mark Newhouse
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/taminglists
2 comments:
Aviva Furman
April 15,2008
Assignment 2 CTN 161
Review of a Web Tool
CoffeeCup HTML Editor 2007, Version 5.9
http://www.coffeecup.com/html-editor/
Cost: $49.00
Free Download: for 28 days
CoffeeCup HTML editor is a handy tool for designing websites. There are 2 ways in which it can be used: the WYSIWYG visual editor and the code editor. It is simple to go between the 2 views of editing, as well as seeing a preview of your web page. It has lots of helpful features, facilitating the incorporation of javascript, as well as being inexpensive and easy to learn and use.
CoffeeCup HTML editor has many features. Here are some of the features I particularly liked:
• A tags toolbar which is available on the left. It contains all the html tags, plus their attributes. It is very helpful as a resource, and it cuts down on typing, since you can just click on the tag and it will fill it in on your html page. For example, you could click on the img tag, then see all the attributes, such as height, loopdelay, etc.
• Javascript code snippets for performing various interesting functions
• Colorschemer – great little tool for selecting color combinations and trying them out
• An easy wizard-driven way to add flash code snippets as well as page transitions
There were many features I liked about CoffeeCup HTML, as mentioned above, and in general it was easy to use, and very affordable. There were some things, however that were frustrating. The “validate HTML” function didn’t seem to do anything. Working with WYSIWYG was definitely more frustrating than doing than code. It wasn’t clear where to click in tables in order to change colors, etc. and there were definite limits to what you could do in that mode. The code cleaner seems like it would be a very good tool, and it has lots of well-documented selectable options, but on trying it once, it created some rather odd looking code. Despite the limitations in WYSISYG mode, I would highly recommend it for use in the code editor mode.
These articles were interesting. I've used pixel for specifying the size and never used em. Richard Rutter's article recommended using em and percent. I’ll try to use em. And his experiments about text size across the browsers were useful. Mark Newhouse's article taught me how CSS is flexible. I was surprised that he created visual navigation bar without java script!
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