Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Evaluation of first half semester

The assignments that we have been working on in the first half semester have been A9 Box Clever and A11 On the Job. Along with this we have also been working on our Personal Development Profile’s (PDP) for assignment A10 iMe.

The assignment A9 Box Clever involved creating a standards-compliant CSS webpage (CSS Beauty). I really enjoyed creating the webpage as I felt that it allowed me to experiment with different methods and techniques using CSS. I was then able to build the page using the method that I preferred the most. This also helped as I was able to find solutions to problems that I was facing much easier as I had a better understanding of where I was going wrong.

The project also proved to be incredibly frustrating at times especially when it came to make the page render in all specified browsers. When I had completed the website and began to test it even though it was standards compliant it only rendered properly in IE7 and Firefox 2. This was quite worrying at first but after researching further into this and consulting the book Web Standards Solutions I decided to use a hack. This was something that I had never heard of before but I found it to be an extremely important tool. After using the hack in my page I was quite happy that the page now rendered well in the majority of browsers. If I were to do the project again I would definitely use a hack again. I would however try to use an alternative hack so that it doesn’t have to be applied to a large amount of the code which would make it much more efficient.

The other assignment that we have been working on is A11 On the Job. This has involved working as a team on a professional project. We didn’t get off to the best start in this assignment as we failed to win any of the 2 projects that were on offer. After discussing this in our team we decided that restructuring the team may be beneficial. Shortly after doing this we were able to find 2 suitable clients who needed a website doing so things started to move forward. I took on the role of Designer in the team but although we have our set roles everybody is helping each other with their tasks. I feel has brought the team much closer and everything seems to be going well so far.

Along with the other two assignments we have also been writing our PDP’s as part of assignment A10 iMe. The online journals have changed quite a lot from the reflective entries of last year because now we are given more direction on what we should be writing. This has been beneficial however as we have been doing activities such as locating and applying for an Interactive Media position. By doing entries such as this we are able to have more of an insight onto what to expect after leaving the course. One area that I have definitely let slip so far is commenting on other peoples entries. This is something that I am determined to improve on however and I plan to dedicate myself an hour each week to reading my peers entries and posting suitable comments.

3 comments:

Mirhad Kalabic said...

I think your right about the PDP blogs this year. Last year when were not told what to write a lot of the blogs became very dry and boring to be quite hoest, starting with my own. Many times i used to struggle with what to write on my blog, sometimes there was noting interesting to write about in that particular week, but this year we have topics and to be honest so far PDP has been rather interesting so far. Lest hope we get some more interesting topics in the future.

Scott Dunwoodie said...

I had severe shock when I saw my page rendered in i.e.5.5 a few mistakes were self inflicted by typos, but I really didn't have a clue where to start to fix these problems if it wasn't for some help from John my page would still looked awful in i.e. 5.5.

I looked into the subject of hacks I even bought a book "CSS Hacks & Filters by Joseph W. Lowery" as I know they will become more useful as we progress in the web world.

I am impressed that you have used them already, you maybe the next CSS guru of the group!

Craig Burgess said...

From my experience, there's little need for hacks, plus they're not future-proof.

A browser vendor may fix one of the errors that you are exploiting with the hack, which then renders the hack useless, and you're back at square one.

In future I'd say try and avoid hacks, and just write good, standard code. Easier said than done.