A student asked the design question, “Why is hypertext blue?”

I was able to speculate why as a designer I might have chosen the color blue over another; like red. Red indicates alarm where blue is less intimidating yet still provides a strong contrast with surrounding black text and a white background. However, I could not answer the question in terms of any supporting specification on the W3C (World Wide Consortium) web site.

After some searching, I discovered the following answer from the inventor of the World Wide Web, Lee Berners. The following quote is an excerpt from his FAQ web page…

“There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links: it is just a default. I think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to represent link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn’t used much in real documents. Blue came in as browsers went color – I don’t remember which was the first to use blue. You can change the defaults in most browsers, and certainly in HTML documents, and of course with CSS style sheets. There are many examples of style sheets which use different colors.

My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibility least. I used green whenever I could in the early WWW design, for nature and because it is supposed to be relaxing. Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon in many colors but chose green as he had always seen W in his head as green.”

Well there you have it. Blue is a default. There was no design decision on the part of the W3C and the reasons for its usage might be more attributed to  decisions of particular browser developers. My guess is that someone used it, it worked, and others reasoned that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Sometimes standards come into practice more out of habit than anything else. This may be one of those instances.

Note: If any reader knows for sure, I welcome a comment indicating as such.

References

Berners, Lee (n.d.) Frequently Asked Questions. http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html

Definition

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, an archive is a repository or collection especially of information ¹. Using this definition we can say that to a web designer, an archive is the collection of all the files necessary for a web site to function properly. A web site is a collection of files. Those files, which can reside in one or more folders (directories), will often include the following types of information:

1. HTML formatted content
2. Graphics (image files like jpg, gif, and png formats)
3. Videos
4. Audio
5. External CSS (Cascading Style Sheet)
6. External Javascript
7. Flash

Imagine taking your entire web site, with all of its html, images, CSS files, and media files and saving them all into one file that can easily be backed up or sent to another person over a network or through email. Next imagine compressing that one file so that it is smaller than the sum total of the entire web site. That is a web archive. When the file is decompressed, it returns to its previous size, each folder is recreated in the right hierarchy and each file is placed back into its original folder.

Archiving can be used in the following situations:

1. You need to send a folder of files to another member of a design team
2. You do not have direct access to a web server and need to send the web site archive to the webmaster. The web master will then decompress the file and place the files in the correct folder on the web server (this is more common than you might think).
3. The project is completed and you want to back up the project without wasting a lot of space. For example, it it is a large project, you want it to be able to file on a single CD or thumb drive
4. You are taking an online class and the instructor wants you to upload your project to a submissions folder for a grade
5. You are backing up different versions of the design process and will name each archive with a date so that you can document the project timeline or simply be able to revert back to a previous design idea

Compression formats

There are many different types of archiving and compression formats. Some only archive, some only compress, some do both. Several of the most common are .zip, .sit, .tar, .rar, and .tgz. Wikipedia has a great article on the different formats and their purpose and platform². For our purposes, we will only examine the process of creating a .zip archive because it is supported natively on both the PC and Mac platform. The term natively means that no additional software is required beyond the most current version of the operating system. There are software applications designed to create, and expand archives, however we will look at the ways to create the .zip archive using the built-in tools that come with Windows and OSX.

The process

While you can individually select specific files on a one by one basic to include in a compressed archive when it is better to do so, to archive an entire web project it is usually easier to select the root directory file that contains all the files you want to archive. For example, let’s say we have a folder named unitA. The unitA folder contains all of the files necessary to complete the unit A activities.

In Windows

1. Select the unitA folder
2. Click the right mouse button. You will get a context sensitive menu
3. Select the Send to option. A submenu will appear
4. Select the Compressed (zipped) folder from the options. A new file will be created and named unitA.zip

In OSX

1. Select the unitA folder
2. Press and hold down the Control key and then click the mouse. You will get a context sensitive menu
3. Select Compress “unitA” from the options. A new file will be created and named unitA.zip

Extracting an archive

Extracting or expanding is the term used to describe taking an archive and returning it to its original set of files and folders. On both the PC and Mac platforms, the .zip format files are self-extracting. This means that double-clicking the .zip file will automatically create a new folder with the same name and create a copy of all of the files and subfolders in the correct order and hierarchy. No special software is needed.

Note: An assumption is being made that Windows XP and OSX are being used. If you are using an old version of the operating systems, then a third party software application may need to be used to create and extract the archives.

References

1.Definition of archive. Merriam-Webster online dictionary. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/archive
2.List of Archive Formats. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_archive_formats

I received the following question from one of my online students…

“hi! I’m working on the html assignment for Unit A.  I’m trying to do the exercises on A-11, but I can’t seem to make it work. I’ve done it repeatedly, but when I try to open the document in my web browser it just keeps all of the tags, it’s not doing anything like Figure A-10.  It’s talking about a PC so I didn’t know if that had anything to do with it.  I’ve tried to open it on both Safari and Firefox and I can’t make it work.  Also, it says to save it under all file formats and manually put the .htm extension.  Textedit doesn’t allow me to do that.  It does, however, give me a choice to save it as the html format.   I feel like I’m having problems translating PC to Mac language. What am I doing wrong???”

This student is clearly working on the Mac platform. The native text editor on the Mac is TextEdit. Unlike its PC counterpart (Notepad), TextEdit has the capacity of interpreting, editing, and saving in several formats:

• .txt (ASCII character set, or “plain text”)
• .rtf (Rich Text Format. A platform independent wordprocessing format)
• .htm (HTML format)

For the purposes of coding in HTML you want to work in plain text. This is why HTML documents are platform independent. ASCII characters are part of an open standard and are able to be written and read by all devices and platforms. An HTML document can be read by client programs regardless of whether you are on a PC or Mac, or are using any number of operating systems (proprietary or open source).

In TextEdit, you need to set some preferences to ensure you are opening, working, and saving a document in plain text mode. To do that follow the next few steps:

1. Open TextEdit
2. Go into preferences window [TextEdit > Preferences]
3. At the top of the Preferences window > Select the New Document tab
4. Under the Format Section > Select the Plain Text option
5. Select the Open and Save tab at the top of the Preferences window
6. In the “When Opening a File” Section > Select the “Ignore rich text commands in HTML files” option
7. Close the Preferences window

Note: If you already have a document open, you will need to close that document and re-open it after having made the changes to the preferences settings. They will NOT apply to your open document

You should be set. Now you should be able to create your HTML code, save it with a .htm extension, and open it in TextEdit and see the code you previously entered with no problems. To see the HTML code rendered, open that same file in a web browser.

I hope this answered your question. If you have further question, send me an email and I’ll answer them. Let me know if you found this tutorial helpful

My students may be wondering why the video file supplied with their assignment plays properly in IE with an embed tag, but may not work in Firefox. It is because the author of your text book used a wmv media file which is a windows media format. The author is a PC centric developer. PCs running Windows can play it if the Windows media player is loaded on the machine and IE is the browser being used to view it. My guess is that the author had that set up and therefore did not run into problems as he was writing the book. Note: I have successfully played wmv file he supplied, using the embed tag as he suggested, with Safari on the Mac without incident. However, Firefox will not play it using the embed tag.

The following forum discussion on the Mozilla web site discusses this matter in length. Caution… it is technical. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=206213

Many designers today prefer to use Flash to embed video. The Flash player is loaded on 99% of browsers on the internet. As such, media that has been converted to a .flv format to play through the Flash player will play with no problem through the majority of browsers. That is why Youtube, Blip, and most other video upload services use Flash as their media player. While that will not solve all of your design problems involving playing media files, it will meet the needs of the majority of your audience.

I am in the process of updating this course and will discontinue using the current book in the future. For now though, understand that many of the authors practices, while not standards or W3C compliant, are still coding practices you will encounter in the field. Knowing a bit about them will enhance your skills as a designer – especially if you are called to update an existing client web site.

I created the following video to illustrate how to work with HTML within the forum posting area of Desire2Learn. A little HTML goes along way when posting content to a CMS (Content Management System).