Zen Garden exercise

Group members (including myself):

Krystin Watts
Candice Latham



Our least favorite design was #99 Least Favorite Image


We disliked this one because things were visually competing with one another, through color, image and type. The comic book setup was a good idea, but there was no real organization, and the overall flow of reading through it is not too good. We had a hard time realizing where to feast our eyes on the page. Some text blobs are yellow, and others are white, and although there are different sizes of font, they still lead us all over the page. The bright colors clash on the page, and also compete with the type. Also, the main text paragraph is on the bottom, and so is the navigation. No one really feels like scrolling for instructions on how to navigate. Additionally, there are several different styles on the page, which clash with one another. For instance, the yellow LOOK! LIVE PONY! section is completely different from the rest of the page, and has several graphics and fonts and attention grabbers that it leads the viewer to almost skip over it completely due to the fact that we have no real lead to where our eyes need to go. Lastly, there are several different comic book pages within the webpages, and they are vertical instead of horizontal. If scrolling is necessary, the page should at least be seamless and without breaks.


Our favorite design was #135. Our Favorite Image


As a viewer, we enjoyed this page because the hierarchy is very clear on the page, and things are overall aesthetically pleasing. The orange leads the eye directly to the navigation, which is where most viewers look to begin on a website. Also, the page adds depth by adding in a subtle patterned background that goes well with the overall theme. This pattern is also repeated in the navigation bar, and between the main font and the title (and also within the title itself). The color choice was also a nice touch, because they are subtle colors (except the orange) that go together very well. The page allows the viewer to scroll without any interruption, and the separation between thoughts and paragraphs are very distinct and clear. Also, the shape created between the title and main part adds interest to the overall design.


Krystin's Blog (We didn't feel like repeating.)
Candice's Blog
Candice already posted hers before we had realized that we needed to be a group, and Krystin needed a partner, so we kept Candice's the way hers was and I corrected mine to go with Krystin's since we were confused.

409 Home Page Addition

I tried to use the keith.css as an external css file and name my new html home file homeNew.html, since I have never worked with using css outside of my html file before. However, I failed miserably at this. So, I went back to my roots, where I put the css inside of my html file. I also tried adding the classes such as .leftcolumn or function leftColumn( ) inside of my html file and neither of these were not being recognized correctly by the file.

However, I did add some things we learned in class today. I created a pop-up button for my picture, which is a brand new concept for me. This was not very difficult to do, though. The functions are set up similarly to AS3, so I knew how to read them properly and understand them.

Lastly, I tried to validate my code. Although it is the second week of school, I am still quite rusty on html. I keep confusing html and xhtml rules with one another with certain aspects. The only problem that still remains is that the validator claims that it is unable to determine the parse code, which I am unsure how to fix.

I would like to work more with the external css files, because it is alien to me, but at the same time would rather stick to old conventions that work. I would really like to blend the two, and am hoping that in the next assignment I can figure out how to do so.

My page can be viewed at: http://people.rit.edu/~say1534/409/home.html.
(The pull-down menu will include more items to come, such as the midterm, etc.).

Home.html assignment

While working on the home page for our 409 website, I wanted to accept a challenge of designing it myself instead of using the templates. I went with a green theme for St. Patty's day, and added the timecode and menu bar. The menu bar was not hard to do, but the toughest task was the timecode. I couldn't access the code that was seen in class, so I had to type in the date myself. Nevertheless, it still came up correctly, and I hadn't had any more problems other than that.

HTML and XHTML recipe assignment

Our assignment was to take a recipe and create both HTML and XHTML files. They can be viewed at http://people.rit.edu/~say1534/rit737/htmlrecipe.html and http://people.rit.edu/~say1534/rit737/xhtmlrecipe.xhtml.  

Through CSS, I changed the text and background colors, and font. I used an unordered list for the list of ingredients, and created a paragraph out of the instructions. 

As a warm-up exercise, I found this recipe assignment to be helpful.  I haven't done any HTML since last year in IMM, so I found myself looking up some things.  One of which was lists, which we had not done before. 

When I tried to validate my files, I did not have a problem with the XHTML file, since I did that one last, but I did have some problems remembering things for HTML (I confused some things dealing with differences between HTML and XHTML, for example
tags. In HTML, I found that I needed to close tags in different ways, mostly because it does not include a slash at the end of elements, like XHTML needs.  I had almost forgotten to include the slash at the end of the opening tags, such as the initial meta tag. 

CSS was also difficult for me to remember.  I had to look a few things up to help me remember, such as adding color to the background.  The uploaded files on my gibson account include CSS.