End of Week One

After one week, NMS 210 students have gained some facility with XHTML and CSS layouts and styling. For each assignment, the students have been required to submit via our course management system (Moodle) and also all assignments have to be validated for both the HTML and CSS at w3.org.

One thing I want to cover next week is the principle of "inheritance" with CSS. I have noticed a lot of unnecessary and redundant code in the style sheets. Experimentation and troubleshooting a CSS page can be both rewarding and frustrating. The results, however, can leave a mess of useless code that should be cleaned up.

In the future, I want to develop some templates for common CSS techniques. For instance, many students wanted to include image switching or rollover effects without JavaScript. I think the background position changing technique works well but we ran into a few difficulties when trying to actually switch background images. We observed some odd differences in Firefox 2.0.3 and Safari for the Mac.

We will be forming the groups next week for the project phase of the class. There will be 4 groups and each group will develop a website. The Pine River contamination, the CAFO (Contained Animal Feeding Operation), campus security/emergency response, and the Great Lakes water supply will be the risk/crises topics addressed.

That's all for now.
rgr