It looks like the study update will only happen once per week this semester. I have been awarded 10 credits for prior achievement so do not need to undertake the introductory database module on Monday evenings. Yay.

In this weeks Practical Web Development class we discussed the replacement of Microsoft FontPage by Microsoft Visual Studio Express. The unit was supposed to be taught around using FrontPage but luckily is isn’t. The more I have read on the Internet the more I sway to hand coding and using a basic text editor for my interweb deeds. Saying that it would have been nice to have a play around with Visual Studio but the University are not going to invest in that just yet (if at all).

So the demise of FrontPage, this has been put down to the uprising of subject or task specific web sites/applications. These are sites such as Facebook and Myspace for creating a small personal site, for someone with a little more to say you can sign up for a free Blogger or Wordpress blog, to share video - Youtube, and photo’s - Flickr. These were some of the main reasons people used FrontPage and it basically boils down to why not go for the easier, newer and free way of doing it!

So what Microsoft have done is to create Visual Studio Express, which looks to compete more with Dreamweaver in being a very large piece of complex software used for creating large web sites that teams rather than individuals work on. The new Microsoft product also seems to have a distinct focus towards developers.

In class we were given a choice to either look at FrontPage or to review a little CSS. You guessed it I chose the later.

While looking at CSS, we discussed the use of pseudo classes, such as hover, link and visited. We looked at this in relation to the most common tag the anchor tag but were also told that these classes should be able to be added to any tag for example a hover over on a paragraph tag. This discussion led on to the browser issue again. Internet Explorer (IE) version 6 and below would only recognise these when referring to anchor tag. Where as in firefox they should be available for a whole range of tags.

Next week we will be looking at CSS in more detail - I will try to get some tutorials up on the main site to cover basic HTML to the point of introducing CSS.