Week 8 - Musings...

Goans, Leach, Vogel - Beyond HTML

While this article was written in 2005 and the authors generally bemoan the fact that many academic libraries had not, at the time, implemented content management systems for their web interfaces, I think they may have been just a few years early in their complaints. LibGuides seems to have filled the niche that these authors reference and has grown substantially - a glance at their website indicates over 1,700 libraries utilizing their CMS services which operate in a similar method to those reference in the article. The question of content management systems today seems to be the later issue addressed in the article, namely that of the open source vs. in-house vs. proprietary model. As the authors indicated, the gap between those with knowledge of coding language (HTML) and those without is a substantial problem in terms of the ability to update content quickly. In-house and open source systems would seem to require a great deal of initial legwork to make them easy to manipulate and accessible for those with limited coding knowledge. While cost is always a concern, the ability to have support through a third-party company and to have a pre-defined templates for content upload makes proprietary systems very appealing. Regardless, I think we'll start to see CMS start to replace traditional web interfaces at not only academic libraries, but at a number of public libraries as well.

Webmonkey Staff - HTML Cheatsheet

Not an article, per se, but still a helpful piece of information for someone with limited coding experience. Having worked a little with EAD, the system of 'tags' makes more sense than it did before - where I still struggle is in the conversion of a series of tags and instructions to the screen. Presumably an HTML editor is the way this is done, but I'm never quite clear on the output of the editor and how it's 'uploaded' (??) to create a website.

CSS and HTML Tutorials (online)

Interesting and helpful - I'm glad I attempted these after I had a chance to look through the HTML cheat sheet. Despite the fact that the tutorials explained most of the tags, it was helpful to look through the list first just to familiarize myself with the concept of tags. All that said, I'm still not sure how comfortable I would be with having to edit HTML or CSS style sheets if one were presented to me with problems. The tutorials are comprehensive, but how these elements are contextualized and put into practice to create a website is where I still get confused. Perhaps if I had an opportunity to sit down with an editor like Dreamweaver and play around with this new knowledge, I would have a better idea about how this all 'fits together'.