1. summary of technicalities
Always practice the techniques you learn, that way you work out for yourself what works and what doesn't, what is easy and what is difficult (but worth trying). I suggest you try working with tables in the following order:
- first, just try and get a simple 2 × 2 table on your page which tabulates some text. Don't worry about whole page layout, styles or anything like that - just work with the tags themselves and get a feel for the three-level structure of <table>, <tr>, <td>.
- try using styles (ad hoc, or in the style sheet) to control the table. background-color is a good property to use here as the results are very obvious!
- try restricting this style to only some of the table cells by using a class.
- once you're confident with that work with subtler style changes like width, padding and border.
- expand the size of your table, either by adding more cells and/or by turning it into a table which contains all page content.
- practice using colspan, rowspan and nested tables to get complex grids.
Once you've got to the end of that list you will be able to use tables for pretty much anything!
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2. what's coming in lecture 5
We have learnt to format text and structure the layout of a page. But one important reason for the popularity of the WWW has not yet been touched upon. The WWW became the most popular and visible use of the Internet mainly because it was the net application that was the best at handling images.
Images have many applications on line, from illustrations and diagrams to links, menus and mere decoration. The lecture and online teaching materials for week 5 will tell you all you need to know about different applications of images, from simple pictures to thumbnails, backgrounds and more.
As that is a relatively straightforward topic - honestly! - the lecture for week 5 will also give you some advice on what option to choose for this module (remember that your teaching in weeks 7-10 is for your option rather than this Web Design Core). It will also begin to deal with publishing your site: we will talk about the technicalities of doing this in week 5, although the underlying principles (copyright, legalities etc.) will be left until lecture 6.
End of lecture 4.
return to the lecture 4 index
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