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Elizabeth Washington
Elizabeth Washington
(Gainesville - United States)

Writing on the Internet, Week 4

Week 4

EQ

  • What other tags can I use in my blog posts?

Goal

Students will...

  • master a subset of XHTML tags useful across a variety of platforms.
  • be able to access extended ASCII characters

Freewrite

  • Dramatically describe your earliest memory of the World Wide Web?
How did you find it? What did you think?

The discussion that follows this freewrite can go off into myriad fascinating directions. Go with the flow. Students are rarely asked to reflect on the technology in their lives. Where does it come from? What origin myths are in place? Share your own stories in contrast. What does everyone imagine today's 3rd graders might say in the future?

Activities

Outline in some detail the transactions among a user, a browser, and a webserver. Where is the code we see in View Source in this process? Why do we call it "markup language?"

HTML is platform-independent. Beside your blogs, where else do you see markup languages? (Students may anticipate future lessons and mention Wikipedia. They may also mention messageboards like PhpBB that implement a special kind of markup.)

Why does HTML use angle brackets? Would you have chosen a different character?

HTML Essentials

  • p: paragraph
  • a: anchor
  • h1, h2, h3, h4, h5: headings
  • em: emphasis
  • img: image
Hotlinking Images

All images on the web have a unique URL. With most modern browsers, you can get this URL using a "Copy Image Location" feature.

Demonstrate constructing the self-closing img tag:


 


 


 

<span style="font-size: 12px">
    <img src="url" alt="description" />
</span>



 



 




 

Why alt? What happens if the URL is broken? What if you are blind? Do blind people use the web? What do they experience?

What are the ethics of hotlinking?

Where are the accent marks and non-English characters?

First, ask the class. There are many ways to access the extended ASCII set and it is likely that students in class have already developed strategies. Type their methodology into the class notes as they come to the front of the class to demonstrate.

Demonstrate the method implemented by your operating system. For example, in Windows, if you have a full-sized keyboard, you can access these characters by holding down alt and typing the four-digit ASCII codes on the number pad.

Describe the 255 characters in the ASCII set. How many can be reproduced with a single or double keyboard press? If students challenge you, ask for a demonstration.

We can access the rest of the characters in a number of ways. One of the most reliable on the web is to use an HTML tag such as this one: ¿ which corresponds to the decimal ASCII code (191) for an inverted exclamation point.

There are many resources on the web for these codes. At the time of this writing, it appears that http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm is an up-to-date listing. It is probably best to identify the characters that will be most needed by your students. Create a handout with this curated list and pass it out in class as well as posting it up around the classroom where others will be able to encounter it. You may find that students have never typed their names with the appropriate characters before!

Homework

  • Compose a paragraph for each of these questions:
  • What is an object that you know very well? How did you become an expert?
  • What is an object that '''knows you''' very well? How do you know that it knows you?
  • Post a rich version of this piece of writing. Link to more information about your object and/or include images.