Week 5's practical exercise

Hi class :) , who managed to crack the PHP exercise last week? Can anyone explain to me how you were able to get:
'Monday 15th of August 2005 03:12:46 PM'

Were we supposed to get thsi exact date or any date in this style?

Also, for people working on a Mac, I downloaded MAMP which enables a server on my mac as well as PHP etc.

CSS

Hey Tony,

I just checked out the CSS site you suggested, I still don't understand the idea of a class and id. Can you or someone else explain??

Lecture 4

Evening all,

So, to check out my undertanding of the first two parts of the practical exercise for week 3 please see http://www-student.it.uts.edu.au/~marswhit/comments-1.html

However, I did encounter a bit of difficulty when it got to the CSS part.

Question Time:

So is the main difference between MySQL and Filemaker is that MySQL is free?
I was confused my what exactly an open source database is in contrast one that is not.

The book I am using currently as a reference to all this marku up language jargon is: Castro, M. 2007 "HTML, XHTML & CSS, Sixth Editin" Peachpit Press, California. Worth a look.

For anyone who had issues understanding wireframes

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/frames.html

Web Site Wireframe 2/2007

(aka Wire Frame, Page Architecture, Low Fidelity Mock-Up, Page Schematic)

What are wireframes?

Web site wireframes are blue prints that define a Web page's content and functionality. They do not convey design - e.g. colors, graphics, or fonts.

How are wireframes used ?

Wireframes - combined with Site Maps -are the bread and butter tools of information architects. Web site wireframes are useful for conveying the general page structure and content requirements for individual Web pages. Typically wireframes are developed by an information architect, requirements analyst, or designer. In many Web groups these are all the same person.

Using detailed wireframes will frequently flush out new requirements and questions that nobody has thought about yet. They also help to keep a paper trail of functional and design decisions that are made. I sometimes use wireframes to get people thinking and generate requirements. Getting signoff on a set of detailed wireframes can save a lot of time and money. Forcing managers and clients to actually think about the site's functionality at a page level will avoid changes later on. Otherwise programmers can end up making endless changes and tweaks to their code.

Wireframes can end up evolving into the default requirements document for a system. I sometimes end up adding a sitemap to the beginning of the wireframe document. I then add notations and requirements on specific pages. Sample Wireframe 2 below is an example of this.

How are wireframes created?

Wireframes - like most information architecture diagrams - can be created using a variety of software programs. I generally use Visio because of its powerful stencil feature. Visio stencils allow you to save libraries of commonly used shapes and elements. I have custom stencils created that allow me to easily drag and drop wireframe elements onto the screen. This really speeds up the process of creating wireframes.

I have also see wireframes created using Excel, Word, and Power Point. So the choice is yours.

Wireframes need to achieve a balance between being too detailed and too general. A wireframe that is too precise may leave little creative room for the designer. A wireframe that is too loosely defined can be misinterpreted by designers and developers. The wireframe format used should be dependent upon the audience.

HTML Wireframes

Information Architects and designers sometimes end up creating the initial HTML layouts that are then turned over to a developer for "real" programming. This often makes sense, because in some cases it's the IA or designer with the best command of HTML layout and design. HTML may be used to create basic wireframe templates that can be used for usability testing or to get client feedback. In other cases the HTML is created in order to keep tight control on the design, rather than leaving it up to the programmer.

Is anyone is class using a Mac?

Hi there DMT students. Quick question, what text editor are people using for Macs?

Music websites that take my fancy

julietteandthelicks.co.uk/

Check out James' Blog

http://jamesmcintyreblog.blogspot.com/

Class 2 Part 2

I just made a mistake people, I posted the first part to this update as a comment to last week's post. Anyway, it has been fixed.

In viewing the diagram on the second page of the lecture notes, I needed definitions in order to press on because I see the terms everyday, I am completely clueless when it comes to their actual meaning. Please see the following:

HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol

Javascript: A scripting Language that adds interactivity to HTML. Hmmm, I still don't understand what it does so if anyone can provide me with an example, I would be most grateful.

CSS: Cascading Style sheets. Allow you to define how web page elements are displayed. W3schools.com provided a great definiton and tutorial on how this works. Basically you require a Selector, a Property, and a Value. The property and value are separated by a colon, and surrounded by curly braces.

XHTML: A cleaner version of HTML. The X is for eXtensible. That is really all I understand about this so it would be great if someone could also go over this.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a server side scripting language

I continued reading the notes and the helpful sites provided to gain some knowledge about the internet in more detail.

• Internet began in 1969
• We connect to an ISP when using the net
• Internet is simply a network of networks
• Every machine using the internet has an IP number, an Internet Protocol number that consists of four numbers
• Computers communicate in binary form which is made up of 8 positions
• DNS is what we view instead of the binary form
• DNS maps text names to IP addresses, this leads into URL'S
• DNS translate the human-readable domain name into the machine-reaadable IP address.
• The top level domain names include .com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov

The browser breaks the URL into three parts:

1. The protocol HTTP
2. Server name, www.DNS
3. the file name, web-server.htm

And that is about it folks. I'm still confused with how ports work, so if anyone has any insight. please comment.

Cheers

Class 2

Firstly, in logging on to my blog, I discovered something I never knew. If you hold down the apple key + F5, a computer voice over is prompted, it is amazing!!! On a PC it refreshes the page.

Anyway. So I did turn up to class on Tuesday night knowing that it was cancelled because I had a few questions I wanted to ask Jeremy (the tutor) and also because I thought it would be a great time to study for a couple of hours.

Keeping in mind that I have limited knowledge of the technical side of the internet, I found this week's reading fantastic.

Both W3schools.com and Webmonkey are brilliant learning sources, in particular the glossary on Webmonkey.

After the lecture notes, I thought it would be wise to read over the basics such as defining the major terms HTML etc.
In summary, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)
is the language used to build webpages. It is also a set of markup tags. Web browsers read HTML documents and display them as web pages. Whatever you open with, you must close with.

After this i downloaded textwrangler to use on my mace so i could have a play with HTML basics. At this stage, I have not tested it on a web space.