Training on Cascading Style Sheets
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2006-12-17 08:34:10 - Graham EllisThere are certain technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that I describe as associated technologies - not our bread and butter training business, but never the less subjects that we need to know, quite well and with practical experience too, as part of our work.
These technologies get peripheral reference during our courses, and we'll gladly work with delegates to show how they tie in - in the case of CSS, that's often no more than a reference to a style sheet from within the HTML part of a web page generated by PHP or Perl. But sometimes, delegates wish or need to go deeper, or to integrate more closely. And so we find ourselves writing further training material which ... given further resources .... could become popular in their own right.
Here's such a new potential public course, on Cascading Style Sheets, and the dynamic use of style in PHP. Pre-requisites include both PHP and HTML skills, and the running length would probably be one and a half days.
| • | Introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (module W701) What and Why? Structure. External, embedded and inline styles. Loading Style sheets. What is cascading and how does it work? | |
| • | Elements of cascading style sheets (module W702) Standard elements. Selectors - element, class, universal, ID and attribute. Pseudoselectors. Document structure and hierarchy. Comments in CSS. Values and Units. Length and colour. Font - families, faces, style, and size. Text transformation, alignment, decoration and spacing. | |
| • | Page layout with cascading style sheets (module W703) Page layout, margins and padding. Floating objects, inline and block display. Positioning and overflow. Visibility. | |
| • | Cascading style sheets - putting it all together (module W704) Putting it all together. Tables v Cascading Style Sheets. | |
| • | Generating CSS through PHP (module H118) Basic steps. Configuring PHP to parse .css. Mime Type text/css. Dynamic input via GET, cookies and SERVER. A worked example. Caching issues. |
Would this be useful for a lot of people? Yes, it most certainly WOULD. There's a requirement under the UK's Disability Discrimination law (the DDA) to ensure that all services are at least equally accessible to anyone who might be described as disabled, and that means things like providing font, colour and perhaps layout changes to suit on your web site. And, frankly, that makes business sense too; why not allow people to change the look and feel of your web site to work for them, even if they're fit, health and with excellent sight!
And the hard work is done, The course is written, tested, and we have the experts to present it. Two things hold me back - a lack of time, and a worry that potential delegates couldn't sell the course to their managers and get authorisation to come along and learn the subject; there are some topics that we can really help with but which are hard to justify to non-technical bosses, and I suspect this is one of them.
Hey - if you're interested in learning about CSS and how you integrate it with PHP for an improved look and feel, such as DDA conformance requires, please email me. And we can put on a fabulous "extra" day for you ... or a full private course if there's a group of you. It's a great subject, can do useful things, and I would love to teach you and show you how it can work in your environment.