DITA - Week 2

The Internet and the Web:

Task One: "Find out about three of the following tags or elements and attributes and parameters that can be used within them."

Paragraphs and Line Breaks:

I feel comfortable with the tags for paragraph (p) and linebreaks (br) which are used to group text on the page, a new line in notepad doesn't translate to a new line in a webpage unless a linebreak or paragraph tag is added. A (hr) tag indicates that a line will be put across the webpage.

Ones I am not so familiar with are Meta Information, Tables, Unordered Lists and Ordered Lists, while I can assume what they do, I have never used them.

Meta Information:

From what I can tell, Meta Tags will not show up in the main body of a webpage, it is also advised to put them into the HEAD section of the HTML. Their function is more behind the scenes than anything else, with smart keywords allowing for search engine optimisation to be more efficient.

Here are a few examples that I have found:

(meta name="description" content="Free Web tutorials" /)
(meta name="keywords" content="HTML,CSS,XML,JavaScript" /)
(meta name="author" content="Hege Refsnes" /)

Pretty self explanatory, keywords for search engine optimisation and so the browser can find the page through a keyword search, I would place myself as the author of the webpage and the description would be a quick few words that describes my new webpage.

Unordered / Ordered List:

For the task ahead of me I have written a brief example of an unordered and an ordered list. A brief unordered list of demands, and an ordered list of the faux rebellion's demands.

(ul)
(li)More cheese on top of pasta bakes(/li)
(li)Less tax on space station duties(/li)
(li)Total acceptance of the new world order(/li)
(/ul)

(ol)
(li)Rebellion(/li)
(li)?????(/li)
(li)Profit!(/li)

One limitation of ordered and unordered lists that I have noticed is it's limited to just bulletpoints and numbers, I wonder how these could be customised to include Roman numerals, for example, which may lay in another computer code.

Task Two:
Producing Some HTML:

As with last week, I have decided to do something a little different from the set task, rather than create a webpage for myself about myself, I have created a fake rebellion with some silly aims.

Firstly, I created a .first page which will be the starting point to my webpage, I did this by using the original HEADTITLEBODY template provided. With some reasonable looking HTML code I imported that into EditPlus2, which highlighted the tags and made things a lot easier to do.

Unfortunately, I did not heed the advice of the tutors and mistakingly left out the closing / for one of my tags, oh the embarassment.

Once I had my first page, I created an index page and linked the first page to it. I created the lists as shown above and played around with some of the meta tags.

(META NAME="Author" CONTENT="MrTeapot")
(META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="New World Order, Rebellion, Take Over")
(META NAME="Description" CONTENT="A massive yarn on you all.")

I was rather impressed as I had only just discovered Meta Tags hidden in the page source and had no clue how to use them, but was soon adding tags to my pages.

CSS

I was worried by the introduction of CSS, and as I had no time to tackle it in lesson, I skipped that part. My webpage will be designed in my own time, I wished to publish my webpage for all to enjoy and skipped to the next task *slap on the wrist for me*.

Publishing

This was the most complicated part for me, understanding how webpages online are managed.

Firstly, I Mapped my W: Drive to allow me to just drag and drop any files I want into my public folder, which can be accessed online.

To actually publish, I had to open a program called Telnet in order to do this. Once I had connected to unix.city.ac.uk and logged in, I could use a single keystroke to publish my html documents and access them again with the URL that leads to my public folder.

Phew. Time to go back and do some CSS stuff now.