November 18 Meeting Announcement

Tne next meeting of the PACS CSS Workshop will be this Saturday, November 18. The topic will be two-column layouts.

We have a special schedule this month. Because the Javascript Workshop will not be meeting, CSS and Flash will each expand by thirty minutes. So we will spend the usual 9-10 period for our regular workshop where we will be putting together the CSS properties we have been working on and use them to create two-column layouts in a few different ways. By the end, we will have templates to quickly create pages, letting you just paste content right into the templates.

For our extra half hour, we will change gears and look at tools for editing CSS. Up to now, we have been composing our style sheets by hand with just a text editor. A dedicated CSS editor can make the job easier. We will look at a couple of those editors.

And we can talk about other tools as time permits.

Flash will then start at 10:30. Mike has some special topics of interest for his extra 30 minutes.

Finally, at Web Design, Reed will continue on page layouts, and we will raffle off a copy of a new book on CSS, Beginning CSS Web Development: From Novice to Professional.

October 2006 Meeting Notes: Layout Properties

At the October session, we continued with the the CSS attributes of float and clear. I have uploaded to the Sample Pages section (see sidebar)a couple of the files we used at the meeting, for those who want to review them and work with these styles.

We used a sample file to compare the HTML use of align and clear with the CSS use of float and clear. That file might be of interest if you want to play with the basics of each. We also used a file to show how to use float and clear to create a drop-cap effect.

We then began putting these properties together to create two column layouts. We will expand on this topic at the November meeting when we work on different types of layouts using CSS.