Week 8 HTML

Notes for HTML

• HTML - hyper text mark up language
• I have always thought HTML was computer code, how to create web pages and such, this it is not, it is a mark up language that the web reads in order to describe web pages

• HTML documents describe web pages that are displayed via a browser

Case study involving Georgia State University, 2000

• The library as well as subject librarians from around the university were given control over individual web pages via Front Page software.  They set up, organized, and ran each page according to their own needs.  The result was confusion.  The pages were created with no restrictions which resulted in flawed web pages.  They were not helpful to students or staff and had poor visual consistency. 
• These pages were also technically inferior.
• In 2000 the library sought to remedy these problems and hired someone to manage the library web pages and their content
• A quote on the definition of content manager "Content management (CM) can be defined as the process of collecting, managing and publishing content (Boiko, 2001; Thamaraiselvi, 2002)."
•  The library and web manager knew they had to seek something besides Front Page to handle their information needs
• They chose to go with a database design featuring MySQL
• The MySQL had tables for the various library holdings (journals, books etc.) and associated information
• Greater control for the librarian to handle the information within the tables and how it looked on the web page
• After some time working within this system they decided to hold a survey before conducting an update to see how this system was received.
• The result of this migration to a CMS was generally positive and achieved the goals of the library.

Overall this article was informative and interesting though I did get a bit unclear as to the details of the CMS and the technological terms used to fully explain how this migration took place.  Am interested to learn more in class so the finer details can become clearer.