D Fontana Blog

HTML5

Dan — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 09:10:06 +0000

All of these are very interesting but the one that caught my eye the most was the drag and drop example. You could implement this in an online shopping cart, adding, editing and deleting items by dragging the into your shopping cart, instead of clicking the usual “Add to Cart” link and deleting the item from your cart by dragging it away into a trash bin like the example itself. I can certainly see myself using this as well as everyone else in the world who could buy stuff off online, I know there are web sites out there on the web already using this idea of dragging and dropping items in shopping carts and edit and ordered list, like on GameFly or NetFlix.com. A member can edit the order there movies are in their Q by dragging and dropping them into place. Right now this HTML5 feature seems really solid, it’s HTML, not JavaScript or anything and it overall works like it should.
Also changing gradient background was really cool, awesome easy background, or fill for a text box on a website, or a navigation area.

Fable edit with CSS3

Dan — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:42:44 +0000

The two CSS3 properties i worked with were border background, working with opacity and i also tried to use border image which didn’t want to work for me. Border background and opacity together make it very easy to have text in front of a back ground, a web designer could use this to set a background and opacity together so that the user could both see the background if it was an image important to the site that should be seen, as well as being able to read the site’s content.

Border image is good because you can a shape or a picture and use this property to set it as a border for an image or block of text. Border image also has repeat, round, and stretch that allows the user to stretch say a square horizontally to stretch across you block of text or picture. This property also has a set border corner image, that allows you to specifically set a picture in each corner, for contrast.

CSS Zen Garden

Dan — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:23:38 +0000

I took a look at the following css; http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/210/210.css&page=0

I chose this design because I like the water and fish background and I wanted to see how they did that because I think it looks very nice and clean. I noticed toward the bottom of the css they used the #extradiv1, #extradiv2, etc. I like how the design used absolute positioning for the background. Place the image where you want it, set the width to 100% or however big you want it, if it just a picture of a fish that you’re adding for more decoration. There was also a lot of “background: transparent(url)”. Other than that everything seemed pretty straightforward.

site re-design

Dan — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:33:51 +0000

1. The site compared to others is really lame, I honestly didn’t even have to look at another site. The mcla cs site is bland and boring, it has nothing going on, a picture a banner and some links on the side. It screams no time and effort.

2. With the mcla cs site I would completely re do the entire thing. There isn’t much there anyway, we don’t have users visiting, so why not just start from scratch.

3. The new design should be simple laid out, displaying information about the cs program here at mcla. The should be like the web standards website.

4. Once again the website doesn’t have much going on, the links either kind of go nowhere or are broken.

As far as the a re-design we should evaluate our website with other competitors and right now as we know our website looks pretty lame compared any site. Next the design of the current site isn’t much, everything is mushed together it seems, we need to set some boundaries and organize things better into categories. The style should be simple, displaying information about our school and what the cs program here has to offer.

January 26

Dan — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:23:53 +0000

The first site I tried to validate with the FifeFox validating tool was www.gamefly.com. This website did not successfully validate.

Results: 220 Errors, 59 warning(s)
Encoding: utf-8
Doctype: HTML 4.01 Strict

Error(s):

NET-enabling start-tag requires SHORTTAG YES
reference to entity “pt” for which no system identifier could be generated
document type does not allow element “SELECT” here; …

The second site I chose was www.torrentz.com. This website surprised me actually for some reason seeing how it doesn’t seem professionally done, so I figured there would be quite a few errors. However there actually only one error. I think that this website got such few errors because of it’s basic simplicity compared the complexity of gamefly.com.

Result: 1 Error
Encoding: utf-8
Doctype: XHTML 1.1

Error(s):

Attribute “autocomplete” is not a valid attribute

1/25/10

Dan — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:41:55 +0000

I hope to learn more about layouts and different ways to organize and cluster information on a web page. Would also like to learn more, or practice more with the spacing of things, like the margins, white areas, etc.

Mainly I got the idea that websites to do not have to look the same in every browser because the link said was “NO!”

LightCMS

Dan — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:41:21 +0000

From what I have found on the internet about LightCMS it “is a content management system for web designers. Design sites, upload them to our content management system, and deploy world-class websites your clients can manage themselves. LightCMS is a simple to use, standards-friendly system, and it’s built to help your business succeed.”

This CMS seems like it allows the user to make a a professional looking website in little or no time at all. Through watching some of the videos on the CMS website, it seems you can view and edit the css and html syntax yourself.

There are some down sides to LightCMS, it seems that you have to use the webspace provided to you by LightCMS which can be a major turn off for some users. The plans can cost quite a bit of money, 500mb, plus they limit the amount of pages you can have on your website, which is pretty stupid.

Havent posted in a while.

Dan — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:25:00 +0000

Hello, lately in web dev class we’ve learning a lot a CSS, more specifically we’ve been doing a lot a work with paddings and moving things around on the web page a lot. We’re working with margins and floating stuff over other stuff. So far this stuff seems pretty tedious but i have a feeling i’ll catch onto it eventually.

Just a moment ago i finished my first of one of the two style sheets for the resume, and i must say i’m having trouble coming up with unique ideas and how to present the information on screen.

Accessibility

Dan — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:15:00 +0000

Screen Reader- I thought screen reader was nearly impossible to use. I tried tried locating the three pieces of information. i got to the phone number, but wasn’t quick enough to write it down. after that i didn’t even bother trying to find the other pieces of information.

Distractibility Sim.- This was very hard to even on easy, i couldn’t even find the directors email. it was hard to search the page and line the little stick man up with up with the falling bomb in your peripheral vision.

Vischeck- I thought it was interesting seeing what color-blind people see day to day. The colors can really change a sites appearance and way it feels.

Dan — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:40:48 +0000

today i found out that a final project was assigned last class, the class that i missed. today we discussed and reviewed selectors, decendency and the HTML family tree, Advanced Selectors + Pseudo-classes, and how to change the state of links before and after you use/click on them.