CPSCI 107: Applications, Implications, and Issues

Homework 11

due: March 29, 2006

Webpage Design

If you build/maintain a website, a task you be faced with frequently is to take a non-hypertext document and turn it into a webpage. For this assignment, take one of your term papers from another course and turn it into hypertext.

Content

Before you begin your work, read Jakob Nielsen's articles "How Users Read on the Web" and "Lower-Literacy Users". Two caveats about this reading:

• Your term paper is appropriately written at college level. I don't expect you to change it to an 8th grade reading level for this assignment (even assuming that were possible). At the same time, as is true of much accessibility work, some of Nielsen's suggestions for making content accessible to lower-literacy readers can make reading on the web easier for college-level readers, too. Those are the suggestions I want you to keep in mind as you work on transforming your paper.
• Similarly, I don't expect you to do a major rewrite of the contents of your paper. You may, however, want to do more "paragraphing" than you normally would, and you may want to introduce new subheadings to break up the text.

Use XHTML effectively in marking up your document. Your use of headings should reflect an accurate outline of your paper (use the "outline" feature of the validator to check this). Use all other XHTML elements (including the phrase elements) appropriately.

Presentation

Write a new CSS file to control the presentation of the XHTML elements of your term paper webpage. Choose style features that enhance the reading of your paper.

Note: Later in the semester, you'll be designing and implementing a navigation system for your warp website. Keep that in mind as you design your web page.

Submission

Create your term paper webpage in your hw directory. Put a link to it on your warp homepage.

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