Session 2: The Internet and the World Wide Web!

 Introduction
This week we are focusing on the internet, the world wide web and creating web pages.
To aid me in my studies I borrowed a copy of Weaving the 'World Wide Web' by its creator - Tim Berners-Lee - from the University Library. I was very excited to read about how the WWW came into existence, and the author's account is made even more fascinating to an Information Scientist because it was originally conceived  as a way of organizing the sharing of information succinctly. In our lectures for the Library and Information Science Foundation, Lyn has reminded us that there have been several thinkers throughout history who have envisaged sharing information via linking documents together, but Tim Burners-Lee happened to be in the right environment at the right stage in technological developments to allow his vision to succeed. I am also fascinated by the way that the internet allows the world wide web to mimic the human brain in the random links that can be made by using it. I can't help wishing that there was a diagram displaying all the links that have been made across the internet between web pages, a bit like this: http://infosthetics.com/archives/2009/02/nytimes_yearly_
visual_overview.html 
Has it been done already I wonder?


As well as from Burners-Lee's book, I have been using 'Internet & World Wide Web: How To Program' 3rd Edition, Deitel, and 'Cascading Style Sheets' Holzschlag, to help me with the more technical elements of this week's exercise, and I have found the later very helpful. Plus there is a very loving forward by Eric A. Meyer about Molly Holzschlag which is quite sweet, and makes me want to meet her!


The exercise:


So, first of all let me introduce you to my web page: http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~abkr563/cssexperiment.html
It all went swimmingly until the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) needed to be inserted, and to be honest, the image won't appear right now, so I need to fix that later.


I learned from my lecture notes that a CSS could be inserted directly into the html document (embedded), or you could provide a link to a pre-made CSS within the html doc (linked). Ultimately I did the later after not being able to make the first option work for me, but this is something I need to explore further, as I feel unsatisfied at not being able to do the first option!


So to make my CSS I opened the wonderful application EditPlus 2, (it's great) and selected the CSS file extension. In order to write my CSS I followed instructions in 'Cascading Style Sheets' Holzschlag (as noted above). I made a Structured style sheet meaning that the styling corresponded directly to the structure of my html document. There were a few hiccups due to me forgetting to insert various punctuations, but now things is cool. 


But rather than recount the process I went through, I feel it would be more beneficial to highlight the key points I have learned about CSS, even though there are so many of them!

• When following instructions for Task 5 in the exercise I applied one of the CSSs Andy supplied to my browser. This resulted in all web pages I opened looking one particular way, and illustrated the flexibility of CSS. I was reminded of what Richard said in the lecture about the choice of emphasis belonging to the web browser. In that instance he was referring to semantic tags, but to me, seeing all the web pages i opened under the influence of Andy's CSS really illustrated the fact that the browser was interpreting the instructions

• It also made clear the nature of CSS as a STYLE language as opposed to a structural language. It gives instructions about the presentational aspects of a document, such as the colour, margin indents etc. A structural language -such as html in this instance- really gives instructions as to the layout of a document, the head, the body, paragraphs, line breaks etc. If you use a metaphor of a taylor, the structural language is the pattern, and the style language is the material used.

• After I had created my CSS I looked at mine and looked at Andy's and noticed a clear difference, in that his tags seemed to be grouped succinctly, whereas mine seemed to be extended. So I had a look in Holzschlag's book to see if I could understand a bit better what was going on here. On page 70 I found some details about GROUPING. Grouping is a shorthand way of writing rules: for example instead of writing out: body {
  margin-top: 100px;
  
  margin-bottom: 20px;
  
  margin-right: 20px;
  
  margin-left: 100px;
  } 
  you can simply group each rule: body { margin: 100px 20px 20px 100px}
  I think the advantages of this are clear, but you have to make sure that the grouping order is correct, as certain properties must come before others in order for the rule to function as you wish.
• I think the last point I would like to note is the structure of rules themselves:
  
  
  
  
  • Selector - identifies parts of the document
  Declaration - indicated the style of the selected section, comprising of properties and values. So for example a selector could be a paragraph, and a declaration could comprise of a color ( property) and the actual color you want (value).

SO that's it.........for now..............