[Air-l] Undergraduate HTML text

[Andy Edmonds]

>>I, too, am teaching a web production course in the spring and would be
quite eager to hear what others consider good texts and essential areas
to be covered.

Core components of CSS (Good inventory of CSS resources at
http://www.web-graphics.com)
	box model
	display types (block, inline, table, none)
	Javascript for dynamically changing styles

Core components of DOM (document object model) and Javascript methods --
This provides the essentials for cross browser DHTML, functional in Win/IE
Mac, all platforms in Mozilla.  See http://www.zvon.org for useful DOM
reference.
	document.getElementById()
	document.getElementByAttribute()
	Parent/child node operators
	innerHTML (not w3c, but de facto standard)
	Accessing form element values. Enabling/disabling form elements.

See http://uzilla.net/uzilla/using_uzilla/design.cfm or
http://clemsontraining.com/schedule.html for demos of the power of w3c
compliant scripting methods. At this point, Netscape 4 is only worth dealing
with in the context of graceful degradation (see wired.com design in NS4).

Mozilla is a great way to teach this stuff.  The DOM Inspector and, to a
lessor degree, the Javascript debugger provide excellent tools and otherwise
unavailable tools. It turns out, the UI in Mozilla is written in an
alternate to HTML (called XUL, pronounced "xool") that has a largely w3c
based DOM, so there are more advanced opportunities there.

The full text of the O'Reilly book on Mozilla is available btw:
http://books.mozdev.org/chapters/index.html

Chapter 5 on scripting offers a good introduction to DOM.

There's a college curriculum development effort just getting underway:
http://mozilla-university.dnsalias.org/cgi-bin/wiki?HomePage

Alas, I don't have much input on the low end of a curriculum -- I teach a
couple from MacroMedia classes that involve hands-on project based
instruction, drilling in table construction and presentation markup through
practice with a touch of css
(http://www.macromedia.com/support/training/instructor_led_curriculum/ft_to_
html.html)

hth,
Andy Edmonds
Human Factors, Clemson Univ
864-624-9776
http://www.clemson.edu/~kedmond