Web 210 Chapter 1
Lecture Notes
Objective #1: Explain the role of HTML in Web design and
it's relationship with CSS.
- Tim Berners-Lee's purpose of HTML - logical document structure, not formatting,
HTML is not WYSIWYG, open, non-proprietary, cross-platform
- browsers allowed style elements such as <font> in mid-90's since web
designers were used to those abilities in word processors
- separation of style and structure came with W3C's 1996 addition of CSS
and ability to create external style sheets
Objective #2: Explain the role of XML, XHTML and their relationship
to HTML.
- XML was created by W3C in 1997 is another
subset of SGML but, unlike HTML, it does not contain predefined elements.
Rather it is a meta-language. It requires documents to be well-formed (e.g.
no overlapping tags, all elements must be lowercase, closing tags required,
strict syntax, use of double quotes, etc.)
- XHTML - HTML meets XML, strict syntax, may have to clean up existing HTML
code, XHTML pages require the formatting of a page to be set by CSS or XSL
(Extensible Style Language), see p. 10 of textbook
Objective #3: Describe how Web browsers display Web pages and the browser
problems that can affect the way a Web page looks.
- incompatibilities due to different parsing engines & proprietary elements
such as <blink> and <marquee>
- browser detection
- lowest-common-denominator approach
- browser-specific coding
- testing web design in several browsers
- deprecated elements such as <font>
- Activity: Find a web page that looks different in Netscape
versus IE.
Objective #4: Explain how a computer's screen resolution can affect
the way a Web page looks.
- 640 x 480, 800 x 600, 1024 x 768
- fixed resolution design vs. flexible resolution design, commentary
- eventually it may be possible to perform resolution detection like browser
detection so that different customized pages can be delivered to cell phones
and 22-inch monitors.
- Activity: Find 2 examples of each on the Web. Turn in the
URL addresses to the instructor