Team 461's 2007 Website

[Emil]

Ben,

Thank you for spending the time to evaluate our website.

You make some good points, especially with the accessibility summary. We designed our website with some accessibility criteria in mind such as alt tags for images, XHTML standards compliance so accessibility parsers can actually understand the website, and a few other things. We will look into possibly rearranging the XHTML so that the content shows first.

As for tables verses css, there is a lot of debate around that. The reason we use tables is because

(1) we have very specific sizing requires for our website (a minimum width, a maximum width, some columns are fixed width while others are variable width, etc) which might actually be harder to implement with css so that all browsers (mainly IE6, IE7, and firefox) behave the same way.

(2) We have a lot of people working on the website and most of the new students are just learning how to write XHTML and it will be a while until they also understand CSS.

We appreciate your feedback and we will definitely make some changes based on it.

[Mr.D]

What program did you use to create the website? Dreamweaver? Frontpage? Other?

[Emil]

Everyone uses whatever they like most. I personally like to use Macromedia Dreamweaver because it supports both HTML and PHP. I occasionally use Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Frontpage 2003 (don't use earlier versions because they are horrible). Often times, i just edit the website in notepad or through an online file manager.

Whatever program I am using, I don't rely much on its WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view because those are usually very misleading. Your best bet is to learn the XHTML and CSS standards well and try out many things to gain experience.

[Gigaman2003]

Originally Posted by Emil

(1) we have very specific sizing requires for our website (a minimum width, a maximum width, some columns are fixed width while others are variable width, etc) which might actually be harder to implement with css so that all browsers (mainly IE6, IE7, and firefox) behave the same way.

Use the css properties min-width, max-width, and as for the fixed width/variable width, those are easy. simply set fixed widths to how many pixels you want, and variable widths to a percentage, or just don't define it!
Its a little tricky but it works.

Originally Posted by Emil

(2) We have a lot of people working on the website and most of the new students are just learning how to write XHTML and it will be a while until they also understand CSS.

I remember when i learned xhtml
There was a lot of sugar and chocolate involved.

Originally Posted by Emil

Everyone uses whatever they like most. I personally like to use Macromedia Dreamweaver because it supports both HTML and PHP. I occasionally use Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Frontpage 2003 (don't use earlier versions because they are horrible). Often times, i just edit the website in notepad or through an online file manager.

I use dreamweaver as well, it really speeds up development. With it you can script without worrying about syntax errors or looking up function syntax... Just concentrate on finding a solution to the problem, and making sure the code works. Now if windows didn't crash every other day...

Originally Posted by Emil

Whatever program I am using, I don't rely much on its WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view because those are usually very misleading. Your best bet is to learn the XHTML and CSS standards well and try out many things to gain experience.

What he said . It's painful to switch from WYSIWYG if that's all you have used before, but its like opening a fourth dimension to play with.