Fantastically Positioned Pages - Day 5 of WEB U

Our day blasted off with a demonstration of how positioning in CSS works. Students learned about static positioning ("browser default!" later exclaimed a student's blog), relative, absolute, and fixed. Oscar took it outside the classroom and pointed out how MySpace uses fixed positioning to keep elements of their site in the same place.



After the demonstration, students drilled down on details by following a worksheet of the same activity.

A good hour into the morning we all went upstairs for a meeting about rules. That prompted a discussion of servers upon our return. Students re-learned how special software turns a regular computer into a server, and Kevin displayed some code he wrote for a class that does just that.

The next 20 minutes or so was a lesson using Felipe's excellent website-cum-activity, inline to external styles. Kevin presented a fictitious future for the students, in which they are professional web designers asked to change the background on 500 web pages for a single website! Using inline styles, this task would take ages. With external styles, however, it takes deleting and adding one word.

For the final stretch, students worked on their BTWs. Kevin was accused of giving students' computers' viruses when the site he suggested, cameriod, wasn't working. At the end of another frantic, exciting day, groups made true progress on their BTWs, and upped their CSS wizardry skills.