lecture 10: lecture conclusion

None of the techniques introduced in this lecture should be considered obligatory on any web site (though I will remind you that you are expected to use at least one of them in your course work for Advanced Web Techniques). They are often used badly, as well. If you didn't have a look earlier I do urge you to have a look at the tragic www.plant-biotech.net site, which I would like to use as a collection of extremely bad techniques, as follows:

• frames for the sake of it - i.e., a menu bar only. This could have been done with tables, and would therefore have been more accessible.
• an icon-based menu that relies on floating captions attributes to present information. It could be worse - at least they've used title attributes, so it works in Opera - but it's still "mystery meat". The icons aren't even that helpful.
• The big image on the front page is a link - not obviously! Click on it - you will see a new window open that is not big enough to take the page within it!...
• ...not to mention the gratuitous and unhelpful image map within, which then loads up text-as-an-image...
• If you didn't follow the earlier instructions on the handout, try now - note the very unhelpful image map (OK, you can work out where this place is by reading the text above, but why make it more complicated than it needs to be?) which, as noted earlier, commits the unforgivable error of omitting target="_top".

These are all basic errors. Please don't repeat them...