Week 8 Readings

1.) W3Schools HTML Tutorial

I'm pretty experienced in writing HTML, so there was not much new in this article for me. It was a good refresher for me though, since I haven't written in HTML in a few years and had forgotten some of the basics to it. For somebody inexperienced in HTML though this would be an amazingly informative tutorial. The tutorial provides a beginner with everything they need to make a simple web page - and with a little practice even an advanced one.

HTML stands for hypertext markup language; it is not a programming language. HTML tag keywords are surrounded by brackets. Most browsers will recognize HTML even without an end tag, but future browsers will not do this. HTML attributes provide additional information. Text formatting allows HTML to change the format of the text, i.e. bold, italics, etc.. One thing I didn't know about HTML was how/or that you could make forms, it was interesting and surprisingly easy. The newest version of HTML is HTML 4.0 - it separates presentation from the document structure. You now use style sheets to change the presentation of the web page, which are much easier and faster.

2.) HTML Cheatsheet

This was a good reference for somebody writing in HTML. This would be especially good for somebody that has a good handle on HTML but is still beginner enough to not remember all the tags. It would also be good for somebody in my position who used HTML a lot in the past, but hasn't used it in a while - as a good refresher for tags.

3.) W3Schools Cascading Style Sheet

This tutorial was very interesting and informative for me, as I have never used a style sheet before. Even though I have used HTML a lot; I always included tags for format and style into the HTML and never used a style sheet. I really liked the tutorial, and is definitely something I would refer to if I ever was to use HTML again.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet, which defines the display of HTML elements. CSS's purpose is to control style and layout - and can be used to control style for many web pages all at once. HTML never intended to contain tags for formatting. CSS syntax is made up of 3 parts: selector, the HTML element or tag you want to define; property, attribute you wish to change; and property value. When a browser reads a style sheet it will automatically format the document according to the style sheet. There are three ways of inserting a style sheet: external, when applied to many pages; internal, applied to a single document; and inline, where you lose advantages of style sheet by mixing content and presentation. There are two different font types: generic family, which all have a similar look; and font family, which are specific fonts.

4.)Goans - Beyond HTML Article

This article is about the new Georgia State University library website. Their previous website was inconsistent, and had to many people doing to many different things (many with no website experience), and had no security. GSU decided to go with a database driven system, which is more flexible and efficient.

Content Management (CM) is a process of collecting, managing, and publishing content. Content Management Systems (CMS) is content disconnected from layout and design. You do not need to know HTML to run their CMS. This was very helpful to GSU, as most of their users were not very familiar with HMTL. Lots of different people have access as content creators yet their CMS still acts as a limited gatekeeper. This system allows the creators the freedom to tag, and organize the content as they want. The CMS system allowed the GSU library to do many more things that their previous file/folder system couldn't do.

GSU chose to go with a CMS system. They looked at other types of systems before they chose this. They looked at programs like Dreamweaver and other HTML programs. They couldn't justify doing this because their current software was free through the university and the library would have still had the same problem. They also couldn't justify spending money on a commercial CMS, because they had other free software. They looked at open source CMS, the problem with this is what the library needed was to big. They would have had to piece together a bunch of different open source software to make it work. They ultimately ended up building their own system.

The heart of the CMS technology that GSU built is a MySqul database on a Windows server. It was made up of: resource tables, which stores content; metadata tables, which assign content to templates; and personal metadata tables, which houses data for logging in and contact info. The CMS is basically a digital repository for a digital library system.