Course Description

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to computer programming in the context of web page design. The goal is for students to employ sound programming principles and to understand how the code that they are writing affects what happens on the page.

This course may be thought of as comparable to a cooking class. In a cooking class, you learn how to cook from scratch. Web authoring tools, such as Microsoft Frontpage™, are the equivalent of frozen dinners.

Also, in a cooking class, the focus is on certain styles of cooking. It is impossible to cover all aspects of web design in a single course, just as it is impossible to cover all cooking styles in a single course.

The primary design tool will be Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. The benefits of CSS include:

CSS reduces the time we have to spend learning HTML. Many HTML tags and techniques are "hacks" that were developed to solve problems that are better addressed by CSS.
CSS allows students to understand how they are controlling page layout.
CSS demonstrates the principle of separating content from presentation.
CSS is viewed by most experts as the "wave of the future" in web design.

A trade-off with using CSS is that it is early in the adoption cycle. CSS is not well supported in older browsers, particularly Netscape 4 and below. It is not a central feature of most web authoring tools. Finally, many web designers are still more comfortable with their pre-CSS "hacks," so that CSS is not often used to its best advantage.

The course will cover HTML, Web graphics, Cascading Style Sheets, and JavaScript. The course will focus extensively on Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is a non-proprietary standard for controlling the position and character of web page elements.

The course also will focus on JavaScript. Students will learn essential computer programming concepts, such as looping, branching, objects, and methods. JavaScript can be used to create dynamic menus and interactive web pages.

This course will assume no background in web design or programming. Students who have experience in web design are going to be struck by the focus on CSS. The course may force them to "unlearn" some of the techniques that they use and to replace them with CSS methods.

Students who have experience with programming in "C" or Java will have a head start in learning JavaScript. I hope that they are patient and helpful with classmates who need to catch up.

There will be tests in the class approximately every two weeks. These tests will ensure that students are picking up the concepts that are being taught in class. Tests will be 40 percent of the final grade.

The remaining 60 percent of the grade will be based on ongoing class assignments. This work will be stored in online folders on the Web server.

My goal is to assign homework only rarely--no more than once a week. However, this will require that students work diligently and productively in class. My intention is to post the in-class assignments on the Web. Students will work at their own pace to complete the assignments.

There is no required text for this course. I will post the required background information on the web site. For my own reference, I am using