week 3

Luckily I got the hang of Assignment 2 and how CSS works. I'm not sure why what I was doing at first that failed, but creating a horizontal list, taking off the bullet points, taking off the underlines, and changing it so that the style changes when the mouse hovers over it was relatively easy. What was more difficult was creating the columns on CSS. But after 10+ hours of fidgeting with it I think I have some of the fundamentals down. Creating a new page with a drastically different style also was good in that it allowed me to compare two different layouts. So now I will begin my adventure into trying to learn javascript....

A use for Firebug!
In trying to learn how to use an external javascript file to send an alert when a button on my page is clicked, I used Firebug to see how the script in an example is used since it was not clearly explained on the example page. In this way, I was able to see what code I needed to write to connect the javascript function with the button. I'm sure Firebug will help me understand more of assignment in this way.

week 2 blog post

CSS is not going as well as I would like it to be. It seems that when I try to style my text by giving it italics, setting the text size, font type, and aligning the text, everything but italicization can be completed. It makes me wonder if there are limitations to how many styling assignments I can make for different headers. Also, I am having trouble having my external CSS file style the pargraphs I want it to on my original page -- I thought I could simply differentiate different Paragraphs by using Classes, but it seems that perhaps Classes do not work for font size. Regardless, it is quite apparent that at this point I have gotten myself confused with the proper workings of CSS. Currently I am using the W3 CSS tutorial but I am not finding that as helpful as some of the API pages offered on our cogs121 Wiki. At this point, I have created an external CSS but I still must create a list, create columns, and style my page. I also found this webpage helpful: http://www.tizag.com/cssT/index.php

Assignment #2 answer:

Still, using CSS has allowed me to see some benefits. The main one is simply that it makes styling one's webpage much easier -- one could potentially apply one's style to one website to the other regardless of the content on the page. One also only has to create an external CSS once, rather than continously put in HTML code in each website that he/she creates to suffice for styling. Additionally, the advantage of classes over IDs is that while IDs define a special case such as when there are two of the same elements for specific cases, classes do the same thing for one or more occurrences. Thus, one should use classes when there are more than one such occurrences in a page, rather than IDs that should be used when there is only one such occurrence in similar elements.

week 1

It is interesting to see how much internet usage there is in Asia, compared to the other various continents -- I wonder why there is such widespread internet use there, as opposed to other places. Still, the usage growth from 200-2007 in Africa, which has the second greatest growth (the middle east is first) makes me think from a development perspective that one can perhaps interpret growth in the usage of internet as the underworkings of development processes. The changing nature of computation, first as simple calculation, and now as interaction is also an interesting comparison. At first it is hard to see computation metaphorically as interaction, but it would seem that as technology becomes more distributed and ubiquitous, and the capacity at which high-level calculation can be engaged at becomes a non-issue, the next step is towards interaction -- the human is able to interact freely and widely so as to have broad control over the computers which they are interfacing (in the form of widgets, interactor trees, and event-driven programming). This probably reflects the model view controller paradigm, where the model uses the view to see the changes made through the controller on a ubiquitous level (so it is not just situated a computer, but really with technology embedded everywhere).

Currently I am working on the html assignment and I have learned several different html tags, such as how to bold, break, change sizes, include pictures, link pictures, link text, etc. Understanding the basics of html is exciting, but it makes me think that for a truly aesthetic and user-friendly webpage, one may need to be quite artistic in creating aesthetically pleasing designs, in addition to having knowledge of basic user-interface concepts learned in classes such as 120. This combination, I suspect, along with more knowledge of html programming and other languages, may result in the right recipe for a good, user-friendly website. I am excited to learn the fundamentals of CSS next week.
-takashi