interactive work
You will create a home page, where you will post your interactive work. You will add a link for each piece you want us to see. We will develop ways to organize these links; this navigational organization will be significant.Some work will involve substantial coding; in these cases, both the interactive product, and the source code count. These programs need to work. User experience is important. So is the structure of your code. (Good structure will turn out to be reusable across assignments.) We may not grade the source code for every assignment, but we also may, at any time. We will always check out your interactive work.
grading
| 10% | Journaling |
| 25% | Midterm Project |
| 35% | Final Project |
| 20% | Smaller Projects |
| ?% | Quizzes |
| 10% | Class Participation |
quoting vs. plagiarism
One nice thing about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code is that it is you can almost always see how someone did something, just by using ViewSource, or by asking the browser or wget to retreive a file explicitly. Similarly, hypermedia authoring involves quoting. On most assignments, you can borrow and quote as much as you want in this class. Assignment one is an example of an exception. When you do borrow and quote MAKE SURE to tell us what you are quoting, and where we can find it. (Failure to do so is plagiarism.)You can even reference your classmates' ideas for the same assignment, as long as you cite. In fact, that could get quite interesting. You will be evaluated partially on *what* you choose to reference, and also on *how*. How do you transform the function and meaning of the referenced material?
web authoring
You will write all code in this class by hand. The use of wysiwg authoring tools, such as front page, dreamweaver, etc, is not permitted. Failure to respect this will result in an automatic F for the entire course.programming style
Good object oriented design is a matter of creating structure which makes code easy to understand and maintain. Writing easy-to-read, well-structured code counts in this class. Create reusable components for yourself, and your peers. Whitespace, naming, and modular structure are keys.At the same time, scripting code and markup actually needs to be downloaded. Thus, unlike with compiled languages and local filesystems, conciseness is also particularly valued. You need to always be aware of download times.
NB: In HTML (and not in JavaScript, nor in just about any programming language you've ever used before), space is a significant character. The insertion of whitespace can make a big difference in appearance. On the other hand, all whitespace characters are equivalent, and multiple in succession are the same as one. Use whitespace judiciously, to improve readability.