Unit 8: Reading Notes

W3schools HTML Tutorial

This tutorial was very interesting, but also a tad overwhelming. There is just so much to remember, and I could easily see spending a few semesters just learning and memorizing how to use html. The interactive "try it yourself" sections were the most useful parts of the tutorial, as I got to experiment, and see what worked and what didn't. My favorite one was changing the colors of text and backgrounds. I kept guessing which colors it would recognize and was pleasantly surprised that turquoise was on the list, and also that I could spell it correctly. As you may notice, I played around a bit with what I learned in my blog.

HTML Cheatsheet

This was very nice to see after going through the html tutorial. Now I know I don't have to memorize all the codes, I can just look at this page or search for another list to job my memory.

W3 School Cascading Style Sheet Tutorial

The take-home-message from this one seems to be that CSS can save you time as long as you don't mess up anything small. I found it interesting that different web browsers have different issues reading mistakes. This never occurred to me before reading through this tutorial. Again I liked the "try it yourself" parts, though in this tutorial they were a bit longer and more complex than in the html tutorial. I found this one more overwhelming in fact.

Beyond HTML

This was a very long article to take in at once, but it also brought up some important points about librarians collaborating in building web sites. Standardization of formats is key, as is pre-planning the scope and layout. I don't think that any one program for helping librarians with CMS stood out. It probably depends on what kind of library you are running as well as how much money you have to spend, what part of the world you live in, and what your patrons want. I would like to play around with FrontPage. It's been so long since I've used Dreamweaver that I should probably have a refresher course in that as well.