William P. Craft

Optional Work:

Reading Assignment:

Everything that was written prior to 2005 about how to use tables in web pages is, for the most part, wrong!

I realize those are strong words, but they are true. Here is some more background on this:

http://www.html-faq.com/csspositioning/?csslayout

http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/everything.html

What's even worse is that using a table under XHTML (strict) and using CSS for styling the table itself is fairly different from the old fashioned HTML way of doing business--even when you are just presenting tabular data.

Do not fear! Our textbook does a wonderful job of explaining the latest and most correct way to use tables properly in XHTML (strict) documents. I have never seen it explained better anywhere else.

So, read Chapter 13, take the quiz, and do the assignment below. You will soon become a table wizzard--and earn an extra 10 points in the course.

Late news:

On page 552 of the text there is an exercise in the book. If you go to the www.headfirstlabs.com website and download the code, there is something wrong with the code. See below for the problem and the fix:

1.   <style type=“text/css”>

2.   <style type="text/css">

Look at the quote marks around text/css in example 1 above.  Then look at the ones in example 2.

In all of the book's code provided on the www.headfirstlabs.com website for this exercise, the quote marks are like example 1, styled and sort of curled inward at the bottom of the quote mark.  I think these are called “smart quotes” and they look good in word processing (like in this message around “smart quotes”).

If you replace the quote marks in the file with ones like those in example 2 (that is, if you type them in from the keyboard USING A TEXT EDITOR not a word processor) the code works.

As “entities” the curly type quote marks have a different code equivalent than the old-fashioned-non-curly, text kind.

Here is the code for the examples above. Note the difference.

<p>1. &nbsp;&nbsp;&lt;style type=&ldquo;text/css&rdquo;&gt;</p>


<p>2. &nbsp;&nbsp;&lt;style type=&quot;text/css&quot;&gt;</p>

I think that what we are seeing is that somebody at the publisher used a word processor to type in the code rather than a text editor.

In any event, if you change the quote marks, things should work for you. 

Discussion:

None.

Quiz:

Take the quiz. The due date is May 24th.

Assignment:

  1. Make webpage with a table built on the standards discussed in Chapter 13.
  2. Style the table using an external style sheet.
  3. The web page must validate in the W3C HTML Validator as XHTML 1.0 Strict. It must display the XHTML 1.0 placard at the bottom of the page and it must hotlink to W3C. This criteria is mandatory to earn any points.
  4. The external stylesheet you use must validate in the W3C CSS Validator as valid CSS. Your web page must display the CSS placard at the bottom of the page and it must hotlink to W3C. This criteria is mandatory to earn any points.
  5. Post the page and its style sheet on your website on the Internet. Give me the exact address in the comments section in the assignment section of the course.

The due date for this assignment is Midnight May 24th. I can not accrept any optional or make-up work after this time.

...WPC