Assignments for English 282, SU 04

All assignments should be kept on your Vergil home (i.e.dante --> public_html) directory; submit your assignment by posting a link to it on the Message Board. Color the link red.

<a href="http://students.washington.edu/snoopdog/assign1.html" style="color:red" target="new">Here is Snoop Dog's first assignment</a>

Assignment #2: Restyle Page
due 23 July

For this assignment, you should choose an already more or less finished page--your own or someone else's-- and redesign its layout keeping content the same. You should use the powers of style sheets to size and position elements, assign colors, borders, white space, fonts (faces, sizes, styles, weight). You do not need to get fancy with dynamic tricks, but you should make substantial use of the resources of style sheets to make two alternative layouts controlled by two external stylesheets. You can link one page version with one stylesheet to the next one with the other sheet, and a link to the original page should be provided. Include a page describing what you were trying to do (which you may not perfectly succeed at); you could put the links to the two pages and original on that page.

Criteria: you should make substantial use of the style attributes available and you should make designs that fall within the tasteful-striking range and are appropriate to the page's purpose and audience.

Samples:

• Eugene Hsu's remake of his class presentation.
• George Lee's remake of Washington Courts' "Do's and Don'ts for Jurors"

The CSS Validator will probably be useful or indispensable for this project. Good rules of thumb for external stylesheets:

1. Don't use =

2. Don't use "" (the only exception is a font name with gaps in it)

3. Close every line with a ;

4. Remove all old-style inline presentation markup (e.g., align, bgcolor); use text-align and background-color in the stylesheet instead

5. Remember that local (inline) specifications override document level (top of page) specifications and both override external style specifications. If a line from an external style sheet is not working on your page, inline markup may be reversing or preventing it from working.

6. Take out and do not use the FONT tag; if you want to put style on a non-element, use SPAN and set the style for SPAN in the stylesheet.

Assignment #2: Make a Text Hypertext
Due 23 July

For this assignment, you should take a text, get it on line if it is not, and then add links to it around various works in the text. Some links should lead off-site and some should lead to other pages (e.g. notes and comments) on site. Some possible ideas might be hypertextualizing: a (good) essay you've written, a news story, a political issue, a brief biography, or annotating a short story or poem like these annotations by

• Tamara Fernandez.
• Christian Walker-Richards
• Grace Kim

Criteria: a minimum of six links (external plus internal) with titles. All links should work and should make sense in relation to the text.

Advice/Tip: Try to avoid wall-to-wall text. Most books have three to four inch columns of text; newspaper columns are even smaller. Contrast that to the seventeen/nineteen inch computer monitors in the lab and you get the idea.

Assignment #4 Group Project
August

Criteria: The report should be unified in style (sharing a common style sheet) and easy in navigation. All links must work and the spelling be correct (as usual). Everyone in the group will receive the same grade, so it makes sense to give helping hand and/or kick in the derriere to any straggler in the group.

Final Project and Portfolio Sheet
due 19 August

Sample portfolio (showing off just a little)Heather Rone's