Week 1 Exercise: Recipe

Here begins my first blog ever. Let's hope I'm able to keep it interesting.

This exercise was helpful in getting me back into the swing of things with html. I've had some experience working with html on my own but not too much and the IDM course that took didn't touch very heavily on html. Therefore, I found myself using the W3Schools website which has a decent amount of information to learn the basics and which helped to refresh my memory.

Professor Habermas said that Textpad is a good tool to do the coding in and while I do like Textpad, I find it much easier to do all my coding in Visual Studio. I really like the intellisense that it provides and it also does its own validation against the type of DOCTYPE you wish to validate against. In addition to this it also allows you to view your html code in design view which basically shows how it will look on the web. This makes it much easier to check how your webpage is going to look without having to put it onto the gibson server and going to it in your webrowser.

With Visual Studio catching all the minor syntax errors I had, when I went to validate the web pages they both passed but they both also had 1 warning (same for both the XHTML and HTML pages). This warning dealt with the UTF-8 encoding and specifically stated:

Warning Byte-Order Mark found in UTF-8 File.

The Unicode Byte-Order Mark (BOM) in UTF-8 encoded files is known to cause problems for some text editors and older browsers. You may want to consider avoiding its use until it is better supported.

I am not too sure as to what problems this might cause (if any) as the Validations did pass. If anyone could shed light on this issue for me that would be great.

The CSS on the otherhand, I have had very minimal experience with and really have only seen CSS files and have not created my own. Once again, I spent my time at the W3Schools site learning about CSS. There is quite a bit to learn, so I feel I will be using this site for a while.

Here are the links to my HTML and XHTML versions of the webpage that I created.
HTML Version
XHTML Version