Assignment 3

http://www.bostonstoker.com is a promotional web site for a local coffee shop named Boston Stoker. The intended audience is the coffee drinking public. The site includes forums for the discussion of coffee and tea, information about the company, an online store, and wholesale buying information. With the URL matching the name of the company, it does a good job of reaching the public, but some areas like the Newsroom have obviously not been updated in some time.

The site uses a monochromatic background image in a rich brown shade. The actual content area uses a variety of background colors with the base of it being red, and specific content areas having different background colors. Within the content area, each element is off center, and the navigation bar is at an angle giving the home page an overall dynamic feel which would be otherwise missing in this essentially static home page. Use of color, especially the way that backgrounds go from darker to lighter, tends to draw the eye into the actual content. This site is useful for mail order coffee and accessory purchases as well as finding locations and hours of the nearest Boston Stoker

In contrast, http://www.myitforum.com is a resource web site intended for IT professionals. Based on the number of people involved in forums, and providing content, it is certainly reaching its intended audience.

The home page changes on a regular basis, and as a reference work instead of a marketing tool it is much less artsy than that of Boston Stoker. This page uses a predominantly white background, yet some content areas have different colored backgrounds. The changing background colors help the eye in discerning between different regions in the home page. This makes it easier to find content quickly. The site is useful to any IT Professional who needs assistance on a project, or just wants to learn more about the tools of the trade.

World Wide Web Consortium

In 1989 Tim Berners- Lee developed the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), wrote a web server and a browser, and coined the term “World Wide Web.”  In October 1994, at MIT, he worked with CERN, and with support from DARPA and the European Commission, founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  In October 1996, W3C published its first recommendation which was a specification for Portable Network Graphics (PNG) 1.0.  Since then, the W3C has developed into an international consortium where members, staff, and the public work to develop web standards. Future goals of the W3c include a richer user experience, making the web accessible to everybody, and the ability to browse with eyes, ears, voice, and touch.  For more details on the history of the W3C, see http://www.w3.org/Consortium/history.

Any organization can join W3c, and, according to W3C, if your organization is putting significant resources into web technologies, you probably should. For-profit organizations with an annual gross revenue of greater than or equal to $50,000,000 would pay $68,500 annual membership fees.  Any other organization including not-profit and government organizations would pay $7,900 in fees.

 

The web Applications working group creates specifications that allow improved client-side application development on the World Wide Web.  By viewing the WebApps Wiki at http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/wiki/Main_Page, you can see APIs under consideration, core interfaces, as well as view documents, both published and unpublished works in progress. The working group uses the Tracker (http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/track/) to track issues.

 I found some other interesting and potentially very useful things at the W3C web site.  For the XHTML 1.0 spec  itself, see http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/.   The HTML spec can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/.    These documents include indepth reference material on elements and tags.  Also available is the markup validator at http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/.  It’s a spell check for your html tags.

Coursework

In preparation for the course, I reviewed Chapter 1 of the text.  It covered history of the internet, Standards and protocols with the associated alphabet soup, Urls, domain names, and markup languages.  I won’t rewrite the history of the internet here, because it is in chapter 1 of every book that is written to deal with the internet.  For a brief history, see http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml.

After reviewing the syllabus and module one assignments, I created this blog, and downloaded and installed Firefox and Aptana Studio.  The adventure begins.

Why Blog?

I’ve been dabbling with the idea of a blog to track my photography, and this new class I’m in is the impetous I needed to create one. I’m taking CIS 136 Intro to XHTML at Sinclair Community College this winter, and the professor is looking for a blog to track learning. So for the moment, I’ll be using the blog for three purposes. XHTML, photography, and Metroparks.