English 382: Writing for the Web (SP 2008)

Instructor	George Dillon (dillon@u.washington.edu) Office hours 2:30-3:30 MW Padelford A404
Time/Location	MW 12:30-2:20 MGH 076
Text	Musciano and Kennedy, HTML and XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Ed. (O'Reilly: 2007). (Browser support information in CSS chapter is a little behind the times.)

Welcome!

This Spring, we will focus on writing and critiquing e-essays about place/locale/geography and issues thereunto appertaining. We will divide our time between the "grammar" of HTML (how to execute various things) and the "rhetoric" of using those things in web pages. Ideally you should know:

how to read the source of an HTML page
how to set colors and fonts on a page
how to insert an image in a page
what Cascading Style Sheets are and they connect to a page

GRAMMAR: Some of the more advanced bits we will use include:

CSS layout, including
- elastic and liquid layout
- positioning and floating DIVs and other elements
Javascript for
- sizing and positioning secondary windows
- hidden/visible popups
- multilinks
Conditional CSS, CSS imagemaps

RHETORIC: Major general design issues include:

finding/retrieving vs. exploring/discovering
reliability vs. magic
control vs. cooperation

Particular sites for analysis:

See The Study Sites tab above for classic work
See the Student Sites tab above for work from previous years