This is a blog for ITSE-1311, an Intro to Web Programming course at Texas State Technical College in Waco, Texas. I'm learning the basics of web programming because my job as the Publications Coordinator at TSTC Waco is rapidly moving online, and I don't currently have the knowledge base to keep up. Follow this blog to read my revelations about the nature of web programming from a public relations and journalistic point of view.
As we transition into CSS, I can’t help but feel like we’re learning to design blindfolded.
This coding method is so unlike other graphic design mediums I’ve encountered, and at the same time (thankfully) similar.
It’s different in that unlike laying out a print piece in a layout editor such as InDesign, Quark or (shudder) Word, CSS coding is just type. You don’t select a photo’s box and drag it across the page to position it; you have to use the proper selector, property and value to align the photo where you want it. Then, you load the page in a browser to see if it moved to the correct location. If not, you make changes and check again. It seems like a lot of trial and error just to move one element! Even then, some browsers may display it differently. I won’t take the relative ease of print design for granted again!
However, it is my print design background that has helped me translate CSS coding to some extent. There are a lot of similarities in the vocabulary and ideas that surround what makes a “good” design flow well. It’s just figuring it all out that will take time!
One wonderful thing about CSS design is the simplicity of making changes to a whole site. Instead of the arduous task of manually changing text color, backgrounds, etc., designers can simply change the code to make global changes across a site that uses the same CSS file. One great example of this is the website CSS Zen Garden. It uses the same HTML and shows it with several different CSS options created by graphic designers from all over the world. So far there are more than 200 designs for the CSS Zen Garden and each page is completely different. The variety of submissions really shows the “the beauty of CSS-based designs.”
Maybe the title is a little misleading, but I am excited about creating my first web page (from scratch) for our first class assignment. We were assigned to create a simple web page with a list of five items including links and photos. Here's mine. Since I put together the shopping list on Sundays, I used it for my list inspiration. I wrote the markup for the page using the HTML Kit editor which was very handy because it put together the structure for the page including the DOCTYPE and HTML, Head and Body tags for me. You can get the free version of HTML Kit here.
What I've learned so far in class, after flying through the chapter on HTML Markup, is that as a whole web programming is a lot more complicated than I first thought it was. The many elements and tags to remember is staggering and the complexity of even simple forms is not something I expected. I know I'll definitely appreciate the next web form I fill out! I'm sure it will seem less daunting once I have a few more pages under my belt. (I hope!)
At work this week, while using a content management system or CMS to edit the new website for TSTC, I got to explain to my boss what a relative URL is and why it would be a good choice to use them instead of absolute URLs for the site because the main domain name is changing. In this case the current working domain name for the site is new.tstc.edu and when we go live with the site, it will be just tstc.edu. The file folder/page structure will stay the same when the domain name switches over, so the relative URL worked great!
My boss was very impressed with my knowledge on the subject; always a good sign that I'm on the right track with this class.
As the Weird Al Yankovic song above says, "Everything I know is wrong, and everything I thought was just so important doesn't matter." Well, maybe not everything, but a lot of things I believed to be true about web programming are wrong.
You see, I'm a marketing and public relations (PR) professional. In my world, not only is presentation everything, very rarely is presentation separated from content. I have a background in print publications including newspapers, magazines, books and newsletters. Formatting and presentation in print pieces are the key to a good end product. In PR and advertising, if a piece is not flashy or "cool" looking no one will read it. The same is true for websites. Formatting and presentation is everything!
Often in PR we try to control every thing on a web page the way we do print pieces with strict spacing, color control and layout. We want it to look the same in every browser and on every screen.
After reading the first 50 pages in our textbook, "Developing with Web Standards" by John Allsopp. I realized that many of the controls our profession wants for the web are unrealistic and in many ways just plain wrong. It was as if Allsopp was speaking directly to me on Page 12 when he wrote,
"Many developers (and marketing departments) think this means that our sites should, or even must look the same in every browser. In fact, the opposite is true. By striving to make our sites identical across all browsers, we can quite easily exclude users."
Exclude users! That's not at all what a marketing department really wants. We want to include everyone and control the way a site looks. Allsopp has an answer for that too.
"Embrace the web's flexibility as one of its greatest strengths, not as a weakness ... It's users who should be able to choose how they view and interact with the web. We have to give up the notion that designers and developers are the ones who are in control."
Really, "Embrace the web's flexibility" is your answer? Is this Allsopp guy some hippie web designer telling corporate marketing departments we can't control everything? No, he's just a realist who obviously knows the very nature of the web is changing all the time, and that chasing after control will lead to an "us vs. them" battle over who decides how the web should look and operate.
To be honest, as a user I wouldn't appreciate anyone telling me how to use the web. Or in what browser to view it. (I use Chrome whether you like it or not.)
So I'm ready to learn about the underlying beauty of web development as Allsopp defines it, semantically structured content that provides information to the most users possible. If I listen to the old, print piece model, I could end up with a pretty site that is inaccessible to users with disabilities or those using a mobile device, etc.
That's not to say I don't want the sites I build to look good. However, I'm learning appearance isn't the first order of business, and neither is control. As Allsopp puts it,
"It's easy for designers and developers to get caught up in the appearance of a website or web application, but much of the real beauty of the web lies beneath the skin. If we develop our sites only to please the eye and ignore the needs of software, like browsers and search engines, we miss more than half of the users of our work."
Looks like I'm not only learning some new languages in this course, but also a new way to view the web and the work I do with it.
