I am hoping that your first week in the course went well. I have not heard too many problems or issues and the forum has been pretty quiet... so I will assume this is the case.

First a couple of administration issues. I asked you to post an introduction in the forum which most of you have done. I had a little time last Friday or Saturday evening and responded to a large number of you who posted replies to my personal introduction. Unfortunately, after I spent an hour or two responding to your introductions, I then promptly deleted my intro which of course then deleted the intros for all those who clicked the "reply" button under my intro... OUCH!

I of course apologize, and am reminded of the basic UNIX rule that one should never log-in as root or the "super-user." Because I am the administrator of the forum, I must have inadvertently clicked the "Remove" button and deleted my introduction and those that replied to it... a bozo maneuver which I hope to avoid in the future. You do not have to re-post an introduction if I deleted yours :-) ... unless you want to.

Thanks to Nick who alerted me to this.

I am assuming that at this point you have obtained the two required textbooks for the course. It is now time to start doing some real CSS.

As with the first week, this guide is longer than usual. There is a lot of reading this week. There are a number of on-line lecture documents provided as well as some number of pages from the Stylin' textbook.

Whether you decide to read the book first, or the on-line lecture documents, is a decision that you will make depending upon your learning style.

I will summarize the provided on-line lecture documents here, but note that in the main schedule page, the documents are listed in order, and I would suggest that you read them in that order. Remember, you can read through the lecture documents in sequence by clicking the Next link at the top/bottom of each page.

And there is a lot of reading this week, though much of it is a review of basic CSS and most of you already possess this information... if not, read these documents to get a handle on very basic CSS and be sure to read the assigned pages from the Stylin' textbook.

Let's get started with the materials this week, and here is a suggested plan which begins with reading the lecture documents:

1. The Separating Structure from Presentation document emphasizes the reasons for using CSS as well as speaks to the point that CSS is designed for different user agents. We can view markup in web browsers, but it is also intended for phones, PDAs, whatever.
2. Next is a discussion of the three different types of styles - inline vs embedded vs external stylesheets.
3. We then discuss the DIV and SPAN tags. Generic block-level elements which we will rely on for structuring our document areas as well as using the SPAN tag to format selected areas of our documents.
4. The major topic for this week is an introduction to basic selectors and contextual selectors... the basic definition of style rules which control specifically targeted elements in our site... important! This also includes a discussion of CLASSES and IDs... again, CSS elements we will use on a daily basis.
5. You are probably going to be sick of my harping on validation, but the more about validation document provides some additional reasoning and logic, importance, and need for developers to create valid markup and CSS documents... why are we validating?
6. I asked you last week to download and install Firefox and the Web Developer Toolbar. The more about browser tools document starts to explore some of the functionality of the toolbar extension.
7. The accounts document goes over the procedure for obtaining your CTIS web space account as well as pointers to tools which can be used to upload your assignments to your CTIS web space.
    
   I think the majority are already familiar with this procedure/tools and is provided as a resource. If you are new to on-line CTIS classes, use this documentation to get you started with obtaining and setting up your web accounts... this is where all of your assignments will be uploaded to... it is required.
8. And finally, there is a document which details how you will submit assignments in this class. Please read this carefully as the specifics may be different than in other on-line classes you have taken here in CTIS... there are details which are specific to THIS class.

Here are the "do-it" tasks for the week.

• Complete the Lab 2 Exercise - This lab exercise is for practice and will not be graded.
  
  It asks you to create a number of different small documents which are each styled with different embedded style rules.
• Complete Homework 2 - You will use a copy of the lab 1 file and style it different ways. One document will use embedded styles while the second version will use a linked style sheet. Each of the two documents will look different.
• Upload your Home Page to your CTIS Web Space.

OK, time to get started. Have fun, and I will see you online!

Please let me know in the forum if you have any questions or issues.