Thursday, July 3, 2008

Advanced CSS

Your blog task is to find two sites that implement a design using XHTML and CSS for design and layout. Post links to the sites along with your commentary on how the CSS is being used, what you like (and don't like) about them, and any questions you might have about their construction. These don't have to be sites about web design nor do they even have to be exceptional sites. A good place to start might be taking a look at the source of some of the sites you've become used to visiting. Are any of them using Style Sheets? My site, http://www.chrislott.org/ is CSS based. It uses no tables at all, but instead uses CSS to create the columns and to style the text and links. You can tell because there are no TABLE tag, no FONT tags, and there are links in the HEAD of the document to the CSS stylesheet.

1. http://www.webdesign.org/

I see a stylesheet for the column and a general stylesheet. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more CSS stylesheets that I am not catching. I think they did a good job of organizing a lot of information. I like how they kept the main text short and utilized the space on both sides of the text.

2. http://www.qvc.com/
QVC has a lot of embedded CSS defined and it is a total bear to read this. Perhaps because it constantly has to be updated. I can't stand the glaring white buttons and background. Geesh.

I just realized why I was having such a hard time with this blog post--we haven't really learned about using CSS for creating layouts. We have been working with using CSS to redefine existing tags, create classes and ID selectors. That is not the same as the creating the layout of a page. In this light, I still like the two sites that I found--they do have good layouts that were created with CSS stylesheets and XHTML. I cannot tell how to critique their use, but I am able to notice that they are being used.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There isn't time in this class to get into implementing more advanced CSS for layout, but I want you to be able to recognize it and have an idea of the direction you would want to go if you want to pursue more learning about web design-- CSS has become the standard for laying pages out, but we've only scratched the surface by looking at formatting!