Muddiest Point: Week 11

What is the practical application of XML over HTML coding? I feel as though everyone I've talked to has said that HTML would be preferred for coding their own sites.

Week 11: Digital Library & Web Search

(1) As technology continues to advance, it is becoming more and more prevalent that libraries, educational systems, and scholarly communities move beyond the hardbound books and journals into a more digital front. (2) Institutional repositories would allow researchers to manage and distribute their digital materials created within a specific institution or by its community members. (3) These repositories would help to ensure access to these materials, as well as preservation and organization.  (4) A repository should not be limited to only researching faculty members, but should also include students and the community.  (5) With the masses of information being poured on to the internet through various sources, such as these institutional repositories, the question of how these are indexed comes to the forefront.  (6) Indexing algorithms are used by search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (GYM), to rapidly identify indexing terms in the documents that may contain a particular word or phrase that a searcher is looking for.  (7) I won't even attempt to understand how these algorithms work because I am extremely ignorant when it comes to these things.  But I know that search engines operate on query algorithms which searches online resources for the query key terms. (8) Many search engines have various ways of speeding these query searches along. Some of these include skipping, early termination, document numbers, and caching.  (9) The quality of these results may vary from user to user.  For example, one user may search for Pot Roast looking for the history of pot roasts, but get top hits of recipe and find that to be irrelevant when another user would be looking exactly for pot roast recipes.  (10) It is important to understand that no search query is perfect.  The more that users post on the internet and deposit into online repositories, the more information that will be available for search queries to scour and, hopefully, produce better results.

Muddiest Point: Week 10

Are there any elements of the XML lab that we missed from this week that would have been useful for Assignment 5?

Week 10: XML

(1) Extensible Markup Language, or XML, is allows a set of rules for encoding documents to be read by both humans and machines.  (2) XML has a series of entities that contain one or more logical elements, which are what mark the start and end of each of the parts of an interchanged document. (3) Document Type Definitions, or DTDs, allow users of XML to check that the document occurs in a valid place within the interchanged data stream, but are not required for XML. (4) XML was not designed to be a standardized coding system, such as HTML is.  (5) XML is a formal language that can be used to pass information about the component parts of a document onto another computer system.  (6) XML is different from other markup languages in the fact that it clearly identifies the boundaries of every part of a document. (7) An XML file typically consists of three different types of markup; an XML processing instruction, a document type declaration, and a fully-tagged document instance.  (8) The processing instruction identifies the version of XML being used, how it is coded, and whether there are external files.  (9) The document type declarations can either contain a markup declaration in an internal subset [between square brackets] or an external subset [referencing a file containing markup declarations].  (10) Finally, a document instance consists of a root element that matches the assigned document type in the document type declaration.  (11) If all three components are present, and the document instance conforms to the rules defined in the document type definition, the document is said to be valid.

Muddiest Point: Week 9

For A5 submission, will the URL we enter onto the Word document be the "http://www.pitt.edu/~PittAccount/"?

Week 9: Cascading Style Sheet

(1) Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, is a style sheet language used for describing the look and formatting of a document written in a markup language.  (2) A style sheet is a set of one or more rules that apply to an HTML document. (3) CSS allows a web designer to specify the various elements including font sizes and colors that would enable them to make their webpage unique. (4) CSS contains 'rules' that are statements about a stylistic aspect of one or more elements. (5) A rule will consist of two main parts: a selector and a declaration. (6) The selector is the link between the HTML document and the style. Selectors specify what elements will be affected by the declaration. (7) The declaration, then, is the part of the rule that states what the specific effect will be. (8) A declaration can be further broken down into two parts: a property and a value. (9) A property is the quality or characteristic that something possesses and the value is the exact specification of that property. (10) An example of CSS coding would be H1 {color: green}. This rule is stating that the heading will be in green font. Although it is not necessary for web designers to 'hand write' CSS codes or to memorize them, it appears that it is more common for them to do so.  'Hand writing' their own CSS codes for a specific webpage allows them to be able to design their webpage to be exactly what they want.

Notes from Required Readings:
1) W3 School Cascading Style Sheet Tutorial: http://www.w3schools.com/css/
2) CSS tutorial: starting with HTML + CSS http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss
3) chapter 2 of the book Cascading Style Sheets, designing for the Web by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos (2nd edition, 1999, Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-201-59625-3) http://www.w3.org/Style/LieBos2e/enter/

Muddiest Point: Week 8

Is it common for web designers to memorize all of the HTML coding?