Advanced Topics for CIS86

This page will get filled in as time permits.

Image Rollovers vs CSS Links States

The only way to ensure a particular font is available for your page is to embed the text into an image. This is commonly done for titles and logos, to make sure that the critical type elements appear in the proper font. By creating an alternate version of such an image, you can create the illusion of a button lighting up as you hover over it. The advantage of an image-based (via Javascript) rollover over a CSS-based rollover is that using images allows you to embed any font you want, therefore not requiring that the viewer have the same font on their systems. This frees you to use an esoteric or silly font with confidence that the viewer will see it the way you want. It does require more images be present for the page to work, which marginally increases the size and load time. Button-sized graphics are pretty small, though, so it’s rarely an issue when so many people have high-speed Internet connections. Another reason to avoid graphics over text for buttons is that search engines don’t understand images.

CSS-based rollovers use properties of links that allow you to specify different appearances and behaviors for the various link states: link, visited, hover, and active. While you can only specify a list of fonts to try with this method, this approach requires no images, and can easily adapt to varying sizes.

PHP and MySQL

PHP is a programming language that runs along with the Web server. The Web developer can embed PHP commands in an HTML file, and rename the file’s extension to be .php. When the user’s Web browser requests a page with a .php extension, then it first allows the PHP preprocessor to process the PHP code embedded in the HTML file. Typically, PHP is used to create HTML to display data that is extracted from a database. The MySQL database system is normally used, since both it and PHP are free software. PHP provides the easiest way to create dynamic Web pages, where some or all of the HTML code is created on-the-fly by the PHP program running in the same environment as the Web server. An excellent example of this is WordPress, the blogging system. Through a combination of HTML, PHP, and MySQL, WordPress creates pages dynamically whenever a browser requests a page.

URL Arguments

This will talk about accessing the argmuents to a URL.

.htaccess

This will talk about Apache’s .htaccess, a mechanism for mapping URLs.

Flash

This will briefly discuss the use of Flash on a Web page.

E-Commerce

This will talk about E-Commerce.

Design for Printing & Mobile Devices

This will talk about ways to design your site to print well, and to display well on small devices like cell phones.

Cookies

This will talk about cookies, a mechanism used by Web browsers to track useful info about you and your browsing habits.

Sessions

Sessions are another mechanism for tracking a user’s progress throughout a Web site.