September 8

Preliminaries

• class website and wiki : http://cs.marlboro.edu/
• introductions
• general info
• expectations and grading
• assignment for next time and what to do with it
• schedule and weekly time managment
• Questions are good.

Course Outline

• see syllabus
• "web design" : aesthetic vs technical; "web standards"
• acronym soup: HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript DOM, AJAX, XHTML, TCP/IP, UTF-8, ...
• discussion : what is your comfort level with all this?

Books and online resources

• Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd ed
• designing with web standards, 2nd ed
• others on resource page
  • wikipedia
  • w3c

Tools

• OS: win/mac/linux
• command line
  • http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml
• ssh , sftp, ftp, ...
• browser : Firefox
  • plugins : WebDeveloper
  • demo "view source" and various web dev features
  • validation - W3C and accessibility
• text editor with syntax highlighting
  • demo text wrangler
• discuss dreamweaver, flash, photoshop, ...
• content management: subversion, cvs, roll-your-own ...

Technical overview of the Web

• client/server
• layers and protocols
• HTTP vs HTML
  • demo with "telnet host 80" from the command line
• web server : http://httpd.apache.org/
  • http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html
• other infrastructure
  • DNS and host names / numbers
  • ports

Practical overview of the Web

• what are your favorite sites ? Why?
• discuss a few of the top ones
  • alexa top 500
• any you've worked on?

"Good" vs "Bad"

• what's your opinion on what works and what doesn't ?
  • discuss; write list on board
  • see http://webpagesthatsuck.com and discuss
  • see http://www.csszengarden.com
    • examine some of the source code for those
• ... more to come ...

examples

• oswd org
• w3c validator
• http://www.braats.org
• http://web.archive.org - the way back machine
• http://cs.marlboro.edu or our course page (not great, but ...)
• http://www.mit.edu/

background information

• grad center HTML tutorial (Jen Kramer focusedconsulting@adelphia.net would appreciate feedback.)
• mention Jen's grad center courses

open discussion

• depending on time, go into any of these in more detail
• or browse resource links
• or answer questions
• or start talking about XHTML and CSS