I opened Notepad and typed the text as requested completed the mypage exercise. I found this to be a very useful and simple task. I gained a good introduction to html in a short period of time.
Writing html tutorial: http://htmldog.com/guides/htmlbeginner/
I then completed the html tutorial.
The title element is really important because it appears on the title bar of the window and becomes the title of the document which shows up when the document is added to “favourites”.
The commands in html need to be very specific, eg
is for new paragraph, otherwise all the words will appear on the same line.
The first time I tried to put in a link, it didn’t work. I had to look through to find out what I had done wrong and found that I mistyped and left out “<” on one of the lines. I learned that I need to be very careful and specific with instructions. When I had finished I initially did not know how to upload the file to the “Student Presentations” page, but explored all the links and found that the “Edit files” was only enabled on one Group and therefore it must have been the group allocated to me, so I was able to upload the file to it. On completion of these tasks, I checked the Discussion Boards and found that many people had similar questions or problems about uploading. I was pleased to find that I had worked it out already!
Standards
When doing the HTML tutorial on the HTML Dog website http://htmldog.com/guides/htmlbeginner/
I noticed that they emphasized writing HTML the ‘right’ way , ie according to the standards of World Wide Web Consortium.
http://www.w3.org/
There were even some tags which did not ‘need’ to be closed for the html to work but according to the standards should be closed. This is good practice for new learners to learn correctly from the beginning and form good habits. It enables others to understand and expand on their code in the ever-changing future.
This helps to illustrate the paradox of the World Wide Web. The internet is constantly changing. Setting standards helps people to keep certain things (such as html code) in a format which can be understood by people around the world. Standards should not restrict changes but enhance them.
Writing on the world wide web is exciting and continually evolving. Whatever code or ideas that are written today, will most certainly be expanded and improved tomorrow. If we use standards then we enable others to understand our code/ideas and therefore share our ideas.
Jakob Nielsen http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/
writes about writing for the world wide web and introduces some very important points to consider when writing. For example:
User’s literacy levels
Target audiences, eg teenagers
According to Jakob Nielsen there has been extensive research on how a reader’s literacy level affects the way they ‘read’ or gather information from websites.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~webteach/articles/text.html
Web Teaching site contained really useful information for writing for the www and I am sure I will refer back to this site on a regular basis.
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/writing/e-text/conventions.htm
On this site Dennis G Jerz lists the top conventions of web pages:
Quote:
Lead with your best stuff
Inform with Meaningful Links
Employ consistent navigation
Prefer simple designs
Write scannable text
Unquote
Copyright
Very important area of research and I realise that I need to be aware that virtually everything that is on the internet is subject to copyright.
I agree with some opinions on the WebCT DB that it was surprising that we were not directed to Australian Law websites as a reference for this topic. However, I decided to research my own. The following were useful:
Australian Copyright Council
http://www.copyright.org.au/
Questions:
Have you used images or words on your web page or website that contravene copyright laws?
I have tried to be extremely careful and aware of the copyright restrictions when maintaining my blog for this course. Where I have used screen shots I have referenced where they have come from and acknowledged the author and source. I believe that these would come under ‘fair use’.
Would you be in breach of copyright if you put the Curtin logo at the top of your web page for an assignment?
The answer to this question is definitely “yes”. Unless the Curtin logo already appeared on the cover sheet which I was submitting or on other paperwork which was required. However, to just place the Curtin logo at the top of a web page for an assignment is a breach of copyright.
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Copyright/
I scanned this website and found the information to be extremely important and relevant. This has piqued an interest in this area and I would like to further research this and perhaps specialise in this field later on.
No comments:
Post a Comment