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July 11 New Web Specialist Track begins Tues 7-15 & Interview TipsJust a reminder to all of you former and prospective students that a new web track begins next Tues. Be sure and get your auditing sheets in if you plan to audit the class. Of course, please feel free to stop in anytime to say hi and check in with what you are up to. Changes for this track include more work on our new web host service, qsh. They seemed to give us a pretty low cost alternative for hosting external pages. Don't forget all of you to continue updating your sites with examples and an online resume is a huge plus for conttract agencies looking to place you. I would recomment an html page and also links to a downloadable .pdf as well as .doc and an .rtf version. Remember that it's use it or lose it - so keep your skills up! and don't forget to let me and Strategy know how things are going. I keep a running list of interview questions and so should you. Immediately after every interview jot down the questions you were asked, eventually you'll end up with a pretty good idea of what the industry expects you to know :-) Forward me your questions and I'll add them to the compiled list.
Okay everyone, good luck and good hunting!
Charlie June 26 Silverlight Class is a go!If we can get a total of 8 students signed up! I'm going to put out the word here at MSN, if any of you out there are interested, please let Stratey know ASAP so that we can get the class on the schedule. Also be sure and spread the word :-). Here's the link to the previous blog article describing the Silverlight class. February 28 Intermediate Quiz 11. What is a Javascript Method and how to you implement one?
2. What is a Javascript function and how do you implement one?
3. What is an example of an event handler?
4. Create a simple function that displays an alert message when called from a button click.
5, How are parameters passed from a handler to a function. To illustrate write a simple function using parameters to display an alert.
6. What is the DOM?
7. What DOM method do you use to get a reference to an element with an id?
8. What DOM method do you use to get a reference to a collection of elements using the element name?
9. What Javascript control structure can you use to go through a DOM collections items?
10. Why is Captain Crunch Cereal important in the history of Hackers? (There's a genuine answer to this- look it up!) February 22 This Weekends Homework ExampleI've published an example of one way of creating the class weekend homework on my Brinkster page. Here's the link to the main page so you can get an idea of what I'm looking for http://www40.brinkster.com/ces614/Examples/ . The link to the leftNav and the Offset Center examples is actually working so you can see how I created the link back to the home page. What these pages look like is entirely up to you though. We'll be taking a look at your brinkster pages on next Tues evenings class so please have them completed by then. Also don't forget to put a link from your blog to your brinkster pages!
See you tonight :-)
Charlie February 20 Answers Quiz 11. Sir Tim Berners Lee
2. SGML
3. The client creates a request for a resource and sends it using a URL. The server receives the request copies the resource and sends it back as part of a response.
4. The browser is responsible for creatint the request and sending it.
5. The web server (IIS Apache , Tomcat etc.) is responsible for listening for any requests (usually to port 80) and the responding to that request.
6. Uniform resource locator
7. Multi part internet mail extension. The "mail extension" part isn't relevent anymore. It's an encoding scheme (from text) that tells the application what type of document it's receiving/sending and how to encode or decode it.
8. Text, HTML and XML
9. Usually a file (text, html xml doc etc.)
10. Element open and close tags must have the same case, All attributes must be quoted. All tags must have a close tag, or use the shortcut close slash.
11. Inside the doc <head> and <body>. The doc itself requires a single root element - <html> .
12. "Red...no Blue-Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaghhhhhhh!!!!". February 19 Class 2 and 3 Quiz1. What are the 3 types of selectors ?
2. What are 3 different mechanisms for implementing style sheets?
3. What is the single default property that is different between a <div> and a <span>
4. What is a composite selector (hint: it uses a comma)?
5. What is a compound selector?
6. What are the approximate specificity weights of the different kinds of selectors
7. Give an example of a sub-property (hint: uses a hyphen).
8. Explain the difference between absolute, relative (remember ducks in a row) and static positioning.
9. What are some common page level rules that you might apply using the BODY and/or IMG selector.
10. What is the average wind speed velocity of the African swallow (with coconuts and without)? February 12 Web Foundation- QuizHere are some questions from last nights class.
1. Who created the original html specification?
2. What is the language specification that html is derived from?
3. Describe the Client - Server interaction
4. What software on the client is responsible for sending the request?
5. What software on the server is responsible for un- encoding the request and sending the response?
6. What does URL stand for?
7. What is a mime type?
8. What are the 3 mime types commonly used?
9. What is a resource?
10. What are 3 major differences between html and xhtml.
11. What are the 2 required structural elements for a html document?
12. What is your favorite color? ( Ihad to throw an easy one in there somewhere :-))
February 11 Welcome to the Web Development Program at StrategyWelcome new students and auditors to the web development program here at Strategy. This blog is a way of staying in touch and up to date on the class homework assignments and shared resources as well as networking with me and the other students. There are several ways of using this tool but probably the most effective is to create a live id/ and or a live email and then send a request to me to add you to my friends list. This will allow you to see my Skydrive files where I share the class code. If you prefer you can also use the Rss link on the main page and an RSS reader to subscribe to the 'Strategy' feed and whenever I add an article or resource the feed will automatically update. I also encourage you to add the other students to your friends list as they are often your best resource for answering questions about the classwork outside of class time since I'm often unavailable. By the way, if you do have questions about the class work please post them as a comment in the questbook at the top of the page so that other students can get the benefit of an answer. I don't often have a chance to reply individually. Also don't forget to check this page often as I frequently post solutions to the home work here as well as career tips and job postings that I might come across :-). I would also encourage each of you to create your own blog/website, afterall - you have to use it to know it!
Good luck, I'm looking forward to exploring the web with each of you!
Charlie Smith January 14 Update to Create Articles- including fixesHello all! I've fixed the issue where links, headers and image tags were being inserted (encoded) as escaped characters (> instead of > etc.) I used a .Net utility class called Http.Decode. I then discovered that using "innerText" to set the text into the XML was actually recreating the encoding! So I inserted the decoded text as "innerXML" instead. I left the text as it was for the Abstract text since I don't want images or headers etc. actually appearing in the abstract. You can follow my changes and a few other fixes by looking at the comments I added in the CreateArticle.aspx.cs file. You can also see what the Labs will be for Tues.
See everyone on Tues!
Charlie December 26 Homework assignment- Answer now posted in Strategy FilesI just posted the answer for the Homework for last weeks class. The assignment was to create a comma separated list of multiple authors if there were more than one author per article. I modified the Articles.xslt file to apply a match to "Author" and then check to see if there more than the current one. If there is it adds a comma and a space. Question: How would you do the same thing that I did using a for loop instead? Hint, you wouldn't need an additional "apply template". December 14 CSS and Javascript questions-Posted Potential Answers!Here are some questions an interviewer might ask- class feel free to add comments and questions that you've been asked as well!
CSS Interview Questions 1. What are the different types of CSS selectors? #ID .Class and Element Name selectors 2. Describe to me the different ways in which CSS can be used to control flow and layout in a page. You may use the : 1. Normal document flow (static left to right - top to bottom) with margins, widths, floats and padding. 2. Absolute positioning where the element selected get its position reference from the nearest positioned parent element or the page itself. Elements may be stacked on top of one another. 3. relative positioning where the element selected get it's position reference from either it's previous sibling element or the nearest positioned parent element (or the page itself) 3. Describe to me the differences between absolute and relative positioning See question 2 above 4. What is a float and how do you restore normal document flow once a float has been set. You may use a clear property on a subsequent element to allow the page to resume the normal element layout and flow 5. What is selector specificity? Specificity is used by the CSS rendering engine to determine which property has precedence when there are conflicts between rules. The more specific selectors a rule uses the more likely it is that that rule will override another that it directly conflicts with. 6. What are the approximate specificity weights for the different selectors? #id = 100 .class = 10 element name = 1 5. If you have a common css file for several sites that sets a width on an div element using an id describe what selectors you could use to override this rule. Assume that the overriding rule would be placed in a latter file. If the html looked like this:
<div id="containerDiv">
<div id="myDiv" class="someClass">
<span>Hello</span>
</div>
</div>
and the original CSS looked like this:
#myDiv
{
color:green;
}
I have several choices if I want to override the green color for the word "Hello" on specific pages. 1. The high specificity weight solution: #containerDiv #myDiv.someClass SPAN
{
color:red;
}
2. The simpler solution:
#myDiv SPAN
{
color:red;
}
JavaScript/DOM Questions
First you need to get a reference to the DIV (assuming it had an ID) using the DOM method document.getElementById("someDiv"). Then using that reference you could retrieve a collection of spans in that div by using the getElementsByTagName("SPAN") method against whatever variable you had assigned to someDiv. You can then loop through that collection with a for loop and for each element (usually using the "i" variable) you could set the .className property to whatever you want. December 07 Homework solution for Thurs. ClassI just uploaded the solution for the last assignment. This was adding a "add to cart" button that displayed the item id. I added back in the link from the xml doc to the xslt to make displaying the results a little easier. After adding the xsl element "button" and the "onclick" attribute I then added stylesheet rules for the button and a height property for the item list. Good luck! I hope everyone succeeds in getting this to work :-) December 05 XSLT Homework solutionI've added new versions of both the xml and xslt files containing a possible solution to the homework. The problem was adding thumbnail album images to our cd descriptions. Here are the steps I used.
1. After creating an images folder in the same location as the xml and xslt files I downloaded appropriately sized album cover images (approx 118 x 118). In the CD xml file I added a <ImgThumb> element to the <CD> node containing the image name of the album image for that CD.
2. In the xslt file inside the cd for-each loop just after the xsl:sorts I added a xsl:element named "img".
3. I gave that element an xsl:attribute named "src"
4. The text inside the src attribute is "images/" followed by the xsl:value-of selected for "ImgThumb".
5. This outputs html that looks like this: <img src="images/image1.jpg"/>
6. I then used stylesheets to float the image right and the button left.
7. I also added some width to the cdlist list items so that the subheads and the rest of the data didn't wrap weirdly.
Thats about it! See everyone in class tommorrow :-) December 01 XSLT Solution for Fridays ClassFor those of you that are paying attention :-) I've uploaded a solution to the CDCatalog homework in my shared folder "Strategy Classes" If you need it... November 29 Last Schema Class- XSLT beginingSo we wrapped up the schemas class with a brief foray into regular expressions and patterns. It's amazing how flexible and powerful regular expressions can be in every language that they are a part of. Regular expressions are typically a part of any program that needs to match complex irregular patterns. In the next class "Transformations" we'll see how XPath can also be used to match regular patterns with a hiearchy of xml elements. We will also use regular experssions to find and replace text elements and attributes within the result tree (this is the document that is created from the transformation). Some other important concepts that we covered are the "choice" element, the decimal , int and float datatypes as well as the min and max Exclusive and Inclusive elements. For the next class we start with what xslt and xsl are, what the primary structures are, and some simple example transformations. If you would like to get ahead there are some great tutorials at w3schools.com for xslt and xpath. I'll post the link under "Resources".
See you on Friday! November 28 XML Schema Wrap UpHi Everyone, well tonight is the last class in schema. I hope everyone will take away some useful concepts including why we use schema at all :-)
Remember we need schema for:
1. Internal consistency. Schema can help internal applications to remain consistent with each other.
2. Ensuring that any application relying upon input from external sources receives valid data.
Some useful concepts in creating schema are:
1. Only be as restrictive as you must be. Don't neccessarily try to rigidily enforce every aspect of input data.
2. Use reusable sections of schema by refering to them by name. This will make the schema doc more readable and maintainable.
Some other concepts that we covered that relate to xml and data in general:
1. Atomicity. Data should be in consistent chunks broken down to the smallest common elements. Remember it's better to build a house out of 2x4's then splinters and logs.
2. Prototype your data structures early and don't be afraid to change them as needed (before you input a boat load of data!).
3. Namespaces are your friend. In schema you can begin to see why namespaces are useful inkeeping tag names and references in order.
Take Care - I'm really looking forward to teaching everyone about transforms next!
Charlie
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