HTML Tutorial
W3 never ceases to impress. This tutorial helped me understand what HTML actually does, and assisted me in separating it from my own preconceived notions. I had previously thought HTML was simply just tagging how digital objects appear on a web page (e.g. color, size, placement, font, etc.). However, the sections on “headings” and “meta” made me rethink this somewhat, as they begin to give HTML some contextual meaning – that is, it can apparently also describe what something is rather than only how it looks.
HTML Cheatsheet
I know I’m going to be reusing this again; nice to have it all in one place. One questions: W3 describes line breaks as really needing only an open break without ever closing it, and HXTML as needing the < br/ >, do you just use the one with the break for convenience sake? Will it always work regardless of whether its absolutely necessary?
Doug Goans, Guy Leach, and Teri Vogel, “Beyond HTML”
Wow, just from the opening paragraphs you can tell their FrontPage project was not going to go well. Right off the bat you see all the examples of why projects fail: lack of standards, communication, and training. I love that everyone was using their own fonts, colors, and layouts, it must have felt slightly psychotic going from section to section or even page to page. Still, it’s unfortunate that it took the web development librarian three years to even begin to implement standards.
So basically, librarians were getting hung-up on presentation when what they needed to be focusing on was content. The CMS allowed them to plug-in content, which could then be run through some type of stylesheet to give it a uniform appearance.
I’m impressed they had a blogging system in place in 2001, and had the foresight to start including social media into their site from the moment they began to standardize it. Guess it just shows how collaboration between web/computer specialists and librarians lead to the best systems for libraries. Also, this is yet another example of the superiority of largely homemade websites as opposed to commercial or opensource packages.
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