Questions and Answers
So far most folks seem happier to talk
over on the
chat page. But I'll
still leave this one here to collect
questions and answers that seem worth
remembering. --Jim
put your question here
Type away ...
last class
Jim, Is our last class this friday or next? I thought it was this week, then I looked at the syllabus and assignment page here and it says Dec 8th. Just checking. I think I will e-mail you as well.
-JD
The last class is not this Friday, it's on Dec 8. I'll email everybody.
making something appear when the mouse is over something
I am trying to make seomthing appear when you move the mouse over it
then when you move the mouse off it goes away.
Any ideas?
grading policy
Can an assignment be submitted a couple of days late?
Please let me know if this effects my final grade.
My policy is that I will certainly accept work late but that
it won't be worth full credit.
How exactly that turns out in practice depends on the details
of how strong the work is, and how late it is.
For the midterm project, it'd be better to have something to show
the class even if you want to continue to polish it over the next
few days - and if that's your intent, submit something
where your work is usually handed in saying that.
As to whether or not that will affect your final grade -
it might, as it's one of the things that will be
factored in. But a few days late isn't going to chage
an "A" to a "C"; the downward bump might be small enough that
it doesn't change the final grade.
I'm not trying to be mysterious, but without a specific
example it's hard to be specific. Perhaps some scenarious
will make my approach clearer.
Essentially I expect to have 3 things to grade,
which will average to produce an overall grade:
1. a homework grade, based primarily on the
* number of assignments completed and
* understanding and effort shown,
2. this mid-term project, and
3. a final project.
How late the work is can affect all three of these.
Consider for example this student:
1. does all the assignments but one: that's an A- or so
2. hands in a strong mid-term ('A' if on time)
that's a few days late (turns into 'A/A-')
3. and turns in a strong final project (A).
That term grade would be an A overall. And for that
student in that situation, having the mid-term late
didn't affect the final grade.
For comparison, another student :
1. misses several assignments and does a minimal job on
the others, about B overall
2. hands in a mid-term that shows good understanding
but doesn't validate and has a technical errors (A-)
3. turns in a final project that is generally OK, but on
the small side with various errors (which would be a B+)
and turns it in a week late (lowered to B-).
That term grade would be somewhere around a B.
In that case, turning in the final project late did
hurt the grade, which would have been a B+ if it'd been on time.
While I'm not planning on 'grading on a curve',
my past classes at the grad center have had
distribution of something like
50% A/A-, 35% B+/B/B-, 15% C or lower.
I hope that helps.
- Jim
what's an 'archive' ?
Stupid question time!
How do I archive a folder to submit my mid-term? Is this the same as zipping it?
-Nate 10/18
That's how I've been handling it. I think the purpose is to simplify our upload process,
as well as giving Jim an easy to transport means of looking at our work - Tony 10/18
background-color and validation
Hi All,
Anyone been having trouble validating CSS code, mine validates but I can't figure out why I get warnings
that I do not have a color with my background-color. below is a small sample of my css code:
containingbox
{
width: 1150px;
height: 600px;
border: 1px solid #000;
background-color: #1E90FF;
}
.floatleft
{
float: left;
width: 100px;
height: 100px;
border: 2px solid #F63;
}
p.highlight { background-color: #ccc }
See anything that looks put of place?
Wes 10/17
I think what the validator is trying to tell you is that you have your background-color set,
but haven't set a color for your text in that element. If users have their own style sheets
with some defaults set differently from your definition, it's possible that they could end
up with text that's light on light or dark on dark instead of the wonderfully rendered page
you were planning on. The W3C
recommends setting
both properties if you set one. - Tony 10/18
Frames and the 'Web Design' book
Hi All,
I've been trying to use some of the concepts in the book (Nutshell). Are the examples in the book complete or do they leave out
needed code? I try them and they don't seem to work. I wanted to try to make frames and try some of the table code and they never seem to come out like the book states. Is there a better source of examples then from the book.
Wes on Oct 7 or so
Hi Wes. It's hard to answer a question like this without a specific example. Would you put up one of the frames that you're trying to do on zonorus or somewhere here?
That being said, are you sure you want to use frames? Personally I usually find them more annoying than helpful, particularly since navigation (forward, back, unique URL's) tends to be obscured. There's at article at 456bereastreet that discusses the issue.
Finally, if you want more examples than the book provides, try googling "css frames example".
- Jim
submitting work
Good morning all,
I just read the email about submitting work and wanted to check to make sure we would be able to edit our work until the due date. I started editing my page for the first assignment and ended up pasting the text to a file on my computer because I knew I wasn't going to finish in one go. Was I being too paranoid? - Tony Friday 7 AM
In answer to my own question: you can edit after submitting. Silly me. - Tony Friday noonish
Hi Tony. Yes, you can submit work after its due; however, generally it'll be worth less. - Jim
midterm project
Is it OK to use a replacement of my current company website for this assignment?
Yes. I'd actually prefer people to be working
on something that really matters; I think that'll be more likely to have substantial content and to be worth putting time into. However, I do also want a version (even if its not the real final product) that can be turned in as 'complete' on Oct 20. - Jim
weird characters
I'm having an interesting problem with those additional characters that are showing up in the code I'm writing. I just tried rewriting my "MCGC Student Spce" page I created for assignment #1 and those characters showed up again! This was a brand new HTML document written from scratch. After trying many things and banging my head against the keyboard, I tried opening the same HTML page with IE 6 (I was using Fire Fox before) and the symbols were gone!
<!DOCTYPE ...
What's going on?
This confused me for awhile too - in some editors/browsers I'd see the extra characters, and others not ... even though the number of bytes in the file wasn't changing. Weird. Turns out it's an encoding problem: the three bytes are a single 'zero width space' character in utf-8 which some Microsoft applications (like Notepad) add to your file automatically. Applications that treat the file as utf-8 show the symbol as a zero-width space (which is invisible); those that show it as iso-8859-1 display the three weird symbols. The apache server on cs is sending headers that say files are utf-8, so once its on cs, a modern browser shouldn't show the weird characters.
The simplest fix is to set your editor's encoding to iso-8859-1 and stick to standard ASCII characters which are the same in either encoding.
The problem is described in (fairly amusing) detail at http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/01/20/357028.aspx
The folder where I was playing around with this,
including some screenshots and what-not, is at the [[weird characters]].
You can also see some of the bit-level details and my notes at [[weird characters / notes ]]
A web page that has these extra bytes (and which mistakenly claims its encoding is iso-8859-1, which is probably part of the problem) is weird_characters/test3.html. You can see what
the W3C validator makes of it - it warns about the extra bytes and the character encoding mismatch (apache says utf-8 while the file says iso-8859-1.
-- Jim
Notes
- I suggest putting new questions at the top, where they're easier to find. Wes, I moved yours up there. - Jim
