1-AIN-636 Modern Approach to Web Design

Evaluation during the course: project assignment

Concluding evaluation: examination

Subject aim: Course surveys current trends in Web design, provides overview on currently available and ever emerging family of Web design technologies, techniques and tools, with emphasis on creating highly usable, accessible, and carefully balanced high quality Web pages in accordance with the W3C's recommendations.

Brief curriculum of the subject:

Students are expected to be already familiar with HTML/XHTML and basic CSS. We start with basic building blocks on top of which Web is built: DNS, URIs, HTTP. We only briefly review HTML/XHTML and concentrate on XML, XPath, XSLT, and advanced features of CSS in depth. We also introduce XML Schema, and SVG briefly and provide a short review of most popular server-side and client-side extensions. Apart from technology, the course is largely concerned with issues of quality (accessibility and usability standards, typographic issues, writing style imposed and required by Web, browser incompatibility issues), current graphic design trends, current Web publication genres and themes (such as community portals, wikis and blogs), and production issues (dealing with large projects, site maintenance, security of web applications, SEO).

This is NOT a beginners' course. Pre-requirements: HTML (advanced), CSS (basic), server-side Web programming (basic). This is not a graphic design course. This is neither php, asp.net, javascript, ajax, nor flash course -- we only mention these technologies marginally.

Literature:

W3C's specifications: XML, XHTML, CSS, WCAG.

Tutorials and references at http://www.zvon.org/ (DTD, XSLT, XPath).

Web style guide 2nd ed.: http://www.webstyleguide.com/.

Language in which the subject is taught: Slovak or English (majority vote)

Date of the last sheet revision: 12.6.2008