June 22

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Journals 2007

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Learning:
The Journey of a Lifetime
or
A Cloud Chamber on the Mind

Friday June 22, 2007 7:40 am Lethbridge

It is +11 C with a high forecast of +29 C. Sunrise 5:24 Sunset 21:43 Hours of daylight: 16:21

A. Morning Musings

7:40 am

The good weather continues.

Yesterday's progress with CSS was a bit ragged. Today appears to be fairly busy, I am not sure if I will have much time to work on the Web.

Here is where I am at at the moment. I think that CSS should be used to layout the design for a page, and indeed for all the pages on a web site. However if a page has a table in it, then that table should still be designed as a table. But the particular way I have coded the layout should be reviewed. I am not sure I fully appreciate some of the features and the merits of different approaches.

I am presently using a table for all my notebook entries, and will use that approach as well for the birding trips.

My time management approach to planning where I distinguish between "immediate" activities and "later" activities needs to be revised. I like the idea, early in the morning, of identifying those activities that I hope to attend to throughout the day. But the "later" category is too loose. I should keep it as it prevents me from forgetting about an item, but I need to add a new category, called "weekly" that identifies the items that I hope to attend to at some time during the week. I might even extend this to a "monthly" category.

B. Plan

Immediate	Description	Time
Literature	Complete reading "Dreaming Pachinko" by Isaac Adamson	2 hr
Technology	Download & install OpenOffice software	1 hr
	Create "weekly" and "monthly" planning tables	2 hr
	Read & make notes for chap 4 & 5 of "Teach Yourself XML in 21 days"	1 hr
	Read & make notes for chap 1 of "CSS - The Designer's Edge"	2 hr

C. Actual Learning Activities

8:00 am

Let's begin the day with a second attempt to download OpenOffice. This time the download worked smoothly. I now have the file on my hard drive. Good.

But when I try to install it, I receive an error message indicating that I must first install something called X11. When I look at the instructions for doing this I read that the first thing I must do is insert the CD that came with the machine. Unfortunately I don't have this disk. I think it might be at the university as they did the original installation and set-up.

Technology is another time sink.

8:40 am

Now to try setting up a couple of time planning tables. I will be able to use a copy-and-paste from my earlier table on June 19 to get started.

June 17-23	Description	Start	End
Literature	Continue reading "Dreaming Pachinko" by Isaac Adamson	Jun 19
Technology	Download & install OpenOffice software	Jun 21	Jun 22
	Create "weekly" and "monthly" planning tables	Jun 22
	Read & make notes for chaps. 1 - 6 "Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days"	Jun 18
	Read & make notes for chaps. 1 - 2 of "CSS- The Designer's Edge"	Jun 22
Birds	Review photos from June 20 trip to Kehoe lake	Jun 20
	Create web page for June 20 trip to Kehoe lake	Jun 20

June	Description	Start	End
Technology	Download & install OpenOffice software	Jun 21	Jun 22
	Create "weekly" and "monthly" planning tables	Jun 22
	Recode journal pages using CSS
	Read & make notes for chaps. 1-13 "Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days" (1 chapter a day)	Jun 18
	Read & make notes for "Learn Macromedia Dreamweaver 8"
	Read & make notes for chaps. 1 - 2 of "Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer's Edge"	Jun 22
Science	Read & make notes for "The Canon" by Natalie Angier

Major Goals	Description	Start	Month
Learning	Review week's pages each Sunday
	Review all pages for the month at the end of each month
Technology	Review & edit iPhoto files for 2006
Model Trains	Become proficient with 3rd PlanIt software
	Install DCC on model train layout
GO	Learn to play GO at something better than a beginner level
Drawing	Learn to draw!! (I keep saying this, yet I have yet to put a pencil to paper).
Mathematics	Continue to play with mathematics.
Literature	Continue to read Literature
Bird Watching	Continue to engage in bird watching activities.
Later
Literature
Technology	Learn how to attach a digital camera to my spotting scope
	Burn backup of images onto DVD
	Read & make notes for "Switching to the Mac"
Mathematics	Read & make notes on The Humongous Book of Calculus Problems
	Write a paper on mathematics education
	Continue reading "Algebra: Abstract and Concrete" by Frederick Goodman
	Read "Symmetry" by David Wade
	Make notes for "Mathematics: A Human Endeavor" ch 1
	Read "Fearless Symmetry" chap 9: Elliptic Curves
Model Trains	Add ground cover to oil refinery diorama
	Follow tutorial for version 8 of 3rd PlanIt
	Continue assembly of coaling tower
	Purchase DCC system
History	Begin reading "Maya"
	Read Watson "Ideas"
Philosophy	Read & make notes for "Breaking the Spell"
	Begin reading "How Are We To Live?" by Peter Singer
Literature	New York Times easy crossword puzzles
GO	Complete reading "Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go"
Puzzles	The Orange Puzzle Cube: puzzle #10

I need a way of keeping track of when an item is added and when it is completed. I have added a couple of columns on the right side of the table for this. But I still need to fill in the cells.

2:00 PM

I am back on the screen.

I found the Apple installation CD and have now installed something called X11, which allows me to install OpenOffice. This is now successfully installed. Great. I have yet to actually try it out.

Returning to time management and my various time planning tables ... I realize that I had something similar set up some time ago under the title of "Projects". Here are the links to the 4 projects that I had established:

Now to review them and see if I can determine why they fell into disuse.

Now that I am retired, it is essential to create some "imaginary" projects in order to maintain some sort of focus and commitment. One of the weaknesses with my previous approach is that I had too many projects.

I like the way the Literature project was set up and it is still in regular use. I have a list of fiction books that I purchased in the past few years and have now a record of which ones still need to be read as well as a annual list of what I have read this year.

However the other three projects are a different story. They have all fallen into disuse. In order of current priorities I would rank my top 4 projects as:

Literature
Technology
Birds
Mathematics

Literature is well in hand. I regularly try to spend at least one hour each day on this, sometimes 2 - 3 hours.

Technology is in high geaar. I am determined to get on top of XML and CSS. I am presently using 3 books:

Teach Yourself XML in 21 days.
This book focuses on XML and schemas but XHTML and CSS forms a subset of this material.
Learn Macromedia Dreamweaver 8
This book focuses on using Dreamweaver. By following the exercises one gets a good feeling of how to use the software, but the book is light on the actual ideas underlying the procedures.
Cascading Style Sheets - The Designer's Edge.
This book seems to be the ideal one for me at the moment.

Having said this, I would like to continue the first book as well. Let's see if I can maintain a chapter a day. Since I began on June 18, I should be finished 5 by the end of today. At the moment I am about to begin chapter 4. I will try to maintain the same pace with the CSS book, beginning with chapter 1 today.

The above is a form of "book learning". I will back off from trying to modify these pages for a few days until I feel that I have a better understanding of the topic.

I now have a fairly full table of activities for today.

Technology 26

June 22/07

3:20 PM

I want to begin making notes for "Cascading Style Sheets - The Designer's Edge" by Molly E. Holzschlag.

I will try for a chapter a day.

The book contains 9 chapters.

"To learn and use CSS effectively, you must have an understanding of the underlying technical structure of both web markup and CSS itself." [p. 1]

I agree. This is the conceptual (i.e. theory) part of the topic and it forms the foundation for the technical (i.e. Dreamweaver) steps. The first step is to understand what one wants to do, then one needs to learn how to do it.

Chapter One Understanding Structured Markup [p. 3 - 29]

One of the early HTML tags was that for data tables. Great. But then someone realized that if you turned off the borders you had a system for designing a page layout. But tables were not intended for this use and this has led to difficulties when the tables become complex and heavily nested. Different browsers may also interpret such complex code in different ways resulting in different views for the user. There is now a general feeling that the field should re-evaluate its procedures and establish a set of standards that will lead to a greater uniformity of results without compromising innovation and creavity. This new set of standards is known as XHTML.

The principal idea of XHTML is to separate document structure and style.

This page conforms to XHTML 1.0 transitional.

The first line of code is:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

The book mentions the following website as one which focuses on the educational aspects of W3C's recommendations: http://www.webstandards.org/

There is a lovely debate at this website (see "On Quality Education" by Holly Marie Koltz) ( http://www.webstandards.org/2006/05/24/on-quality-education/ ) on the current situation of Web design courses which are often "table-based" rather than CSS based. I am determined to make sure that all of my work from this day forward involves using CSS.

Document structure involves:

A DOCTYPE declaration

An html element (the root element)

A head element with a title element

A body element

Structural elements

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6

p, br

ul, ol, dl, li

div

table, tr, td

Document presentation involves:

color

text formatting

background graphics

borders, padding, spacing

layout of pages

At its most strict, HTML 4 suggests that the author leave tables behind as a means of presenting layut and instead us Cascading Style Sheets for the positioning of objects on a page.

This page currently is a blend of CSS and tables. Tables are used both for the overall layout as well as for some genuine tables (e.g. the planning tables). These notes are currently set up as a table. I have some work in front of me.

There are 3 types of Document Type Definitions:

Strict

Transitional

Frameset

Browsers now require a Document Type Definition in order for them to determine how they will interpret the following code. A strict DTD does not allow hardly any presentational elements. A transitional DTD does allow a number of presentational elements but also encourages one to move away from these.

"With XHTML 1.1, the concept of separation of structure and presentation is complete. XHTML 1.1 has only one public DTD, based on the Strict DTD in XHTML 1. Web authors also have the option to work with modularization.

Modularization breaks HTML down into discrete modules such as text, images, tables, frames, forms and so forth." [p. 17]

"XHTML is much more rigorous than HTML and demands close attention to details." [p. 17]

It is recommended but not required that an XHTML 1 document be declared as an XML document using an XML declaration.
It is required that an XHTML 1 document contain a DOCTYPE that denotes that it is an XHTML 1 document and also denotes the DTD being used by that document
An XHTML document has a root element of html. The opening tag of the html element should contain the XML namespace xmlns and the appropriate value for the namespace.

Here is the code that is generated automatically by Dreamweaver when creating a new basic page using XHTML 1.0 transitional.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>

<body>
</body>
</html>

Here is the code that is generated automatically by Dreamweaver when creating a new basic page using XHTML 1.0 strict:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>

<body>
</body>
</html>

Three important syntactic rules for XHTML are

that the elements be nested properly,
that every tag have a closing tag,
and that all values of attributes appear in quotes.

5:00 PM

This has been a very enjoyable 2 hours. I can honestly say that I understood the material. It was a good review.

I still do not know how to create a document that displays the material the way I might envisage it, but I do have a good understanding of the principles that I will be following when I do it.

5:50 PM

I have read chapters 4 & 5 of "Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days" but do not see the need for any notes at this time. The basic idea is that of adding DTD statements to the code in order to specify the structure and values that data in an XML file must have in order to be valid. This same idea is discussed again in chaptes 6 & 7 where the solution is to create an external schema file instead of using DTD statements. The books notes that this approach appears to be gaining acceptance as the preferred method.

That completes my "work" for the day. It has been very productive and satisfying. I am delighted with my planning tables and will continue to work on them tomorrow.