Week One Readings

15th January 2013 Week One:

When I read “The Read-Write Web - Technology that Makes We the Media Possible” from chapter two of a book called We the Media - 2. The Read-Write Web (by Dan Gillmor) discusses a vision of making the read/write web pages. From the early and mid-nineties, websites were mainly read-only. The vision was to make it more feasible for a web developer like the guy in this story, who pointed out a visionary of making a weblog-based website. There are four common ways to get and retrieve information from the weblog:

• Wiki:
• It is a site where users can alter information based on commenting or disagreeing.
• Rich Site Summary or RSS:
• Get the contents of a subscriber’s blogs.
• Peer-to-Peer or P2P:
• is a server or client-based node that shares files among computers. 
• Short message services
• allow users to send messages to other people without using a PC. 

When I read “The Business Value of Web Standards” <http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/e000266>  I learned that making a website with multiple HTML files with one CSS file. Following this procedure can reduce bandwidth usage, the time needed to update the site, and the cost of hosting the site. 

When I read “Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE!” by Jeffrey Zeldman (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/doctype/>), I realized some rules need to be followed. It’s very important to abide by the required document-type rules. Otherwise, the website will run in Quirks mode*.

* According to the “Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE!” article, the quirks mode is the browser’s assumptions that run in old-fashioned, invalid markup and code per the depressing industry norms of the late 1990s

• Here is a website that goes into more detail about doc types: http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/doctype.html 

 Part two: (the right post)

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000167 EndHTML:0000002791 StartFragment:0000000663 EndFragment:0000002775 -->

From reading the “5 Reasons Why You Can Use HTML5 Today” article by Craig Buckler, the article discussed five good reasons for using HTML5 and CSS3 instead of the old HTML and CSS format. The first reason was that most newer browsers can support HTML5,   except the old Internet Explorer browsers. A few tweaks will do the trick for the information part; however, the site’s look will be bad. The second reason is that HTML5 is a predecessor of HTML4/XHTML 1.0, so HTML5 has 26 additional tags. The third reason the specification of HTML5 will never be completed is that W3C currently has no restrictions set for the browser vendors to follow. As stated in reason number one, the fourth reason is that most new common browsers (including Internet Explorer 9 and 10) support HTML5. Most people are adapting the HTML5-based web page for various reasons. The fifth reason for average users is that HTML5-based websites are new. Apple iPads and iPods can run them and play HTML5-based videos without problems.

From reading the article “HTML vs. XHTML* on standards compliant websites” by Sean Fraser and “HTML or XHTML?” by Robert Nyman, both articles discussed the discoveries about HTML vs. XHTML. Here are a few things that both articles mention about using the strict HTML 4. XHTML 1.0 and 2.0 are not backward compatible. If XHTML 4.0 strict is used as application/xhtml+xml, Internet Explorer will not work. HTML5 is backward compatible



* According to “HTML or XHTML?” An XHTML document is a document that has to be well-formed according to the rules of XML.