Notes for Week 8 Required Readings

W3school HTML Tutorial
http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/

    At the beginning, the tutorial provides some basic explanation about HTML.
HTML: a markup language for describing web documents/pages

• Stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
• Markup language: a set of markup tags
• HTML tags: describe HTML documents; each of them describe different document content

HTML tags: are key words (tag names) surrounded by <>

• Normally come in pairs like: <p> (start or opening tag) and </p> (end or closing tag)

<!DOCTYPE> declaration helps the browser to display a web page correctly

HTML Editors: Notepad or TextEdit (for Mac); professional HTML editor, such as Adobe Dreamweaver; Microsoft Expression Web; CoffeeCup HTML Editor

HTML Elements: everything from the start tag to the end tag

• Can be nested: elements can contain elements
• Empty elements: <br> (defines a line break)

Attributes: provide additional information about HTML elements

• Are always specified in the start tag
• Comes in name/value pairs like: name="value"
• Always use lower-cases attribute; always quote attribute values 

Headings <h1> to <h6>

• Search engines use headings to index your web pages
• Use headings to show the document structure

XHTML: Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language

• Stricter than HTML

    Additionally, the tutorial has many quizzes to help me test myself. It is very helpful.  

    More importantly, this tutorial provides very specific examples for creating web pages. After reading this tutorial, I got a general idea about how to create web pages. Also, I will use this tutorial as a guide when I have some problems creating web pages.

HTML Cheatsheet
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/02/html_cheatsheet/

    This handy page contains the most common HTML tags with their proper syntax. I think it's very convenient for a tyro or a amateur like me to have this when creating web pages.

Pratter, F.E. (2001). Introduction to HTML, Chapter 2 of Web Development with SAS by Example, 3rd Edition (Google Book)

• This chapter is mainly for SAS users.
• This chapter provides examples with detailed explanation. 

• IDE (Intergrated Development/Design Environment) vs. text editor
• XHTML: must be "well-formed" (lowercase; closing tags; nest properly; attributes must be quoted)

HTML Lists

• Unordered - bulleted
• Ordered - numbered
• Definition - a series of term/definition pairs

Style Sheets (Templates): create a uniform appearance by separating the content from the presentation; also simplify web page maintenance.

• using a single style sheet to format multiple web pages to create a consistent look across the site

HTML Forms: collect user input

The reference include a list of good how-to books for learning HTML.

Goans, D., Leach, G., & Vogel, T. M. (2006). Beyond HTML: Developing and Re-imagining library web guides in a content management system. Library Hi Tech, 24(1), 29-53

This paper provides a practical experience about designing a content management system (CMS) to manage web-based research guides at the Georgia State University Library.

• Technical, functional, and managerial developments
• Practical user factors