comm244: Midterm

Midterm Assignment

Advanced CSS Demonstrations

For your midterm project you will work in pairs. Each pair will be assigned an advanced CSS property or group of properties to research. You will learn what your property does and then present it to the class in a 5-10 minute demonstration.

Each of these properties allows us as designers to do something very easily which in the past was very complicated. All of the properties and selectors that I've selected only work in some browsers, and therefore should be used with caution while keeping both the ideas of graceful degradation and progressive enhancement in mind.

Assignment Specifics

You will research your topic and answer the following questions:

What does your property or selector do?
Why is it a improvement over previous solutions? You don't need to get into too much detail on this. Many of the previously used techniques are very complex.
What browsers (and versions of browsers) is your topic supported in? What browsers does it not work in?

You will create 2 web pages for your top:

The first page will be an explanation of your topic and will answer the above questions. There should be a link to it from the home page of your class website. You may design this page however you like, but remember to follow all of the web techniques we've already talked about.
The second page should be a demonstration of the CSS property in action. This page should show us what the code looks like and how to use it. There should be a link to this page from the first page which explains your property or selector.

This is a good example of when using internal styles are appropriate. By using internal styles, it makes it easier for other people to view your source code and see what you've done.

For this project, you will need to write examples of HTML and CSS in your HTML pages. The following page explains how to do this:

Using Code Examples in HTML

Presentation

You will present your topic to the class in a 5-10 minute demo. You should use the two web pages you made for this purpose. The presentation should answer the questions listed above and show the class how to use the property.

These demonstrations should all be relatively short. The idea is not to "teach" the properties or selectors to the rest of the class, but to demonstrate them so that the other students have seen them in action. If they would like to use the properties at a later point in time, they will be able to find and use the two web pages you created.

By the end of the project, you should know one of the topics in depth, and have an idea of what the other ones are (from the other presentations).

Topics