Links

Request lab subject

Lab 6 will be a small project. You probably requested your state or foreign country when you submitted your week 5 work in Canvas.
You need to have your topic approved by the instructor before starting your week 6 work.
I normally aprove or reject your topic within two days. Every student must select a different state or country. If you choose a popular state or foreign country such as California, you may wish to provide a second and third choice, in case your first choice is already taken.
If you did not request a lab 6 topic when you submitted lab 5, go to canvas and resubmit your lab 5 including your topic request for lab 6.

DO NOT START WORK ON LAB 6 UNTIL THE INSTRUCTOR HAS APPROVED YOUR TOPIC.

In week 2 and lab 2, we worked with links to a web page. Remember that we can link to a web site, a directory in a web site, or a specific page in a web site.
We linked to web pages in other sites; this is called an absolute link, because the full http transfer protocol is specified.
We also linked to other pages, looking in our current directory; this is called a relative link. Relative links can also relate to other directories within our server by specifying the path to the directory.
We also considered copyright limitations in week 2 and lab 2.

Internal links

Internal links allow you to link to a specific place within a page, rather than just linking to the top of the page. You must specify an id at the location where you want to go. Then you must specify where you want to go in the <a> tag.

Look at the samples, to understand what I mean. Look at the source code for these pages. There are comments in the code, indicating what to look at. To look at the source code for a page, right click on the page and select View Page Source

Link style

Usually, you do not want to change the default blue/purple color for links.
Sometimes you want the links to be more prominent.
Sometimes you want the link colors to be lighter, because you are using a dark background.
Look at the sample, which changes the style for the links. The style sheet for the sample page contains:

body
  {
  color:            white;
  background-color: black;
  }
a:link
  {
  color:            #c0cbe7;
  font-size:        150%;
  }
a:visited
  {
  color:            #d2a6c7;
  font-size:        150%;
  }
a:hover
  {
  color:            #fac6aa;
  font-size:        150%;
  }
a:active
  {
  color:            #f0888a;
  font-size:        150%;
  }
         

Title

A title can be put on any element.
If you put a title on an a tag, the browser can use the title as a tool tip. The tool tip appears when the user holds the pointer over the link.

HTML standards

We have been using a simple sample web page to build our web pages.
It contains the following elements:

  • html
  • head
  • title
  • body

We need these four elements in a standard web page.

Validation

We can build a web page, following the sample, that includes the standard required elements
We can validate our pages.
The link is to the standard validator.
The first tab is   Validate by URI   - you can copy the address of your page on voyager, paste it in the Address field, and press check.
The second tab is   Validate by File Upload   - you can copy the address of your page on your home or school machine, paste it in the Address field, and press check.
The validator will probably tell you that you have 429 errors. Do not worry about it. Just fix one or two of the first errors listed. Often that will cause many following errors to go away. After you have fixed one or two errors, run the validator again. Repeat this until the page is valid.

Lab 6

In lab 6 we will begin using a new lab topic. Do NOT start work on lab 6 until the instructor has approved your topic.
Follow the link on the left to read the lab 6 requirements and build your lab 6 web page.

Validate lab 6

Validate your lab 6 page.

Complete Lab 6

You have built your lab 6 web page and uploaded it to voyager.
Look at the page with your Firefox browser, to make sure the page works correctly on voyager.
Make sure your web page is valid.
When it is good in voyager, log in to Canvas and submit assignment 6. The submission should provide the following information:

  • It should say that you have completed Lab 6.

Reading assignment

Read information that your find relivant from the book you selected.