LIS900C

Webmastering: the static web site

2003–04–26

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Course Description

This course focuses on the construction of a web site. Students will learn how web sites work, and how to design good web sites. Students will be provided with free web space where they can design their own sites. This web space will be available even after the course ends.

The course will not be conducted using an application package to generate pages. Instead, students will be taught how to hand-code the pages. The emphasis is on the use of standard compliant HTML 4.01 and CSS level 2.0. Validity control will be an integral part of the composition process. Students are allowed whatever tool they wish to use to create their sites, but final project sites must be standards compliant.

In addition, the course will cover the base ground of background knowledge that is required to understand how the web really works. Students will listen to presentations about http and URIs, as well as on the apache web server.

Finally students will be introduced to the subject of information architecture.

Course objectives

After taking this course students

Prerequisites

There are no other formal prerequisites for this course. However this course is not suitable for technophobes. Students should be familiar with the World Wide Web, and should be able to use a MS Windows computer, i.e. click on an icon to run a program. Students should also be familiar with basic concepts of computer hardware and software, concepts like files, memory, as well as an understand of the Internet and of client/server architecture. Everything that goes beyond that will be explained in class or by personal interaction with the instructor. No prior knowledge of HTML and CSS is assumed.

Instructor

Thomas Krichel
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University
720 Northern Boulevard
Brookville, NY 11548–1300
krichel@openlib.org
work phone: +1–(516)299–2843

Private contact details may be obtained from the online CV.

The class on 2003–05–13 will be instructed by Jeremiah C. Trinidad.

Class structure

Classes will be held in the computing lab of the Palmer School. Each class will have some presentation by the instructor. However a significant part of class time students will work directly with their computers under the supervision of the instructor.

Class details:

0 2003–05–12, 9:00 to 16:00 introduction to the course
1 2003–05–13, 9:00 to 16:00 introduction to HTML
2 2003–01–14, 9:00 to 16:00 introduction to CSS
3 2003–01–15, 9:00 to 16:00 information architecture
4 2003–01–16, 9:00 to 16:00 URIs, http, and Apache

Students

Serena Brooks
Mary Cummo
Brian Debus
Lisa Gerety
Garrison Lutz
Patricia Novak
Werner Sbashnik
Andrew Story
Lourdes Torres
Lisa Zubiller

Readings

There are literally tons of books on HTML and CSS around, choose one that you like. Castro (2002) is a widely used book for beginners. Werbach (2002) is a good online source. Morville and Rosenfeld (2002) is a good book on information architecture.

HTML 4.01 is defined in Raggett et al. (1999). CSS level 2 are defined in Bos et al. (1998). http is defined in RFC 2616. URLs are defined in RFC 1738, but that definition was updated in RFC 2396. MIME types are documented in IANA 2002. The documentation of apache is online at http://www.apache.org.

Students

Assessment

The course will be assessed through the student's ability to build a web site. The site must validate against the strict or loose version of the HTML 4.01 specification. The site should provide an information source about a topic, though it need not to be comprehensive. The total amount of information contained should roughly be equivalent to a conventional student essay.

Valid XHTML 1.0!