adding a splash of colour with css

Sorry that I won't be with you today - snow has closed the highway.

Still, I can point you to the assignment entry below, and to a couple of pages I was hoping we could work through today.

So far we've been looking at HTML as a way to present content (as opposed to formatting it to look pretty). Tags like H1 and strong tell the reader (human or machine) about the importance of elements on the page.

But what about the esthetics I hear you ask...

How can you format the page so that it looks good too?

CSS (cascading style sheets) are the answer. To get a handle on them, work through the pages in htmldog's CSS beginner tutorial. By the time you finish this I'd like you to make an external style sheet file to set your 'things to do' pages' background colour, font colour and font style to something a bit more interesting than the browser default.

HTMLdog's intermediate tutorial also has some interesting material - for example the pseudo-classes for hyperlinks (that we looked at briefly a couple of weeks ago). You should apply these to your 'to-do' pages too.

Finally, you can use CSS to lay out a page, as explained in their advanced tutorial. This is an optional extra for this class, but I'd love to see some of you apply it too.

Oh, and one little extra: the assignment asks for an email link on one page. To save you a couple of keystrokes here's the Google search results

Image: 'Grapefruit Splash'
www.flickr.com/photos/11419506@N08/2272752165

assignment

An assignment for the HTML and FTP subjects

Make a sub-directory for the 'things to do' exercise you started 2 weeks ago and copy your files into it.

Add a link to it on your index page (the one pointing to the various exercises we've done so far).

Extend the 'things to do' pages by adding some images to the detail page(s) - perhaps found on the flickrCC site.

Add a new page to your 'things to do' which contains a calendar table. This table should list your to-do things in the left hand column, with years across the top and an 'X' in the cell when you hope to have achieved each one. Link to this page from your 'things to do' home page.

Inlcude an email link at the bottom of your main index page.

Upload everything to the bathurst-tafe server and give me a cover page with the URL of your finished work.



Image: 'My dream shopping list'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/28481088@N00