What Did We Learn In This Part Of The Course?

First off, it looked to me like Terry really thinks that the web is a big deal because he spent a lot of time at the beginning of this section making that big comparison between what happens when important people - I think they were called patricians - ran everything and then after the web arrived, it was plebeians who ran things. Like there are a bunch of differences in movies and books and blogs and like authors like Stephen King can write and publish their own stuff on the web. There are like all sorts of things!

But if he asks us on a test, like what was the really big, big difference, then like I'd say that it was making things way more democratic. Suddenly after the web arrived, just ordinary people would write stuff and put it up on the web. And that is true of scholars and their journals, and photographers and a whole bunch of other people.

Then Terry did that section on the Garfield guy and that seemed to be really weird - like this guy I never heard about did web stuff before the web, but nobody ever heard of him. At least not me. Like I've never used a citation index, so the whole thing was kind of weird.

And then Terry tried to link all that weird citation stuff to Google. Now I like Google and like I use it every day, but I never thought about how it really works. Like I thought that it indexed the web, and that was that. But Terry got all worked up pointing out that there is the dark web - you know, stuff that is hard to get at because it is behind firewalls and stuff. Ok, ok, I said to myself, Google doesn't index the web, like, big deal! But Terry kept going and really got bent out of shape trying to figure out how Google "gains semantics from web pages" - like, I put in the word "mariners" and like I get lots of "mariners" baseball stuff.

Now it is true that I was surprised by the all the stuff that Google doesn't pick up and it was interesting to see how Terry could build a box - remember that yellow box thing - that said it was about dogs, but when you moused over it, it was really all about cats. That was interesting. Actually, when I think about it, it was a lot more interesting than that Garfield guy who was kind of weird.

Then we finally got to HTML and most of what Terry showed us was stuff that I knew something about. Like I've build web pages before, but I didn't know about that Tidy thing that can turn your page into XHTML. Like that was interesting and I think that I'll remember that because you never know when that will be useful.

And then Terry did a little stuff about style sheets, but like, it was obvious that he's laying the groundwork for more stuff to come because he mentioned that XSL stuff, but he didn't say a lot about it. He said that there is going to be more of that stuff in the next section of the course. Then there was JavaScript, which was interesting because Terry put that Java Applet up on the page, and then he had trouble with the browser in the classroom showing it. Like afterwards, he said that it was an example of the sort of thing that it going on on the web right now, where Microsoft and other companies are fighting over stuff.

I really, really liked the last topic which was about art because Terry showed us a little bit about style and creating things on the web. I mean like there are really interesting things going on on the web right now. You should really take a look. So Terry talked about style and said that USA Today is like an example of web style. Like I don't read USA Today but I get the point of what he's trying to say. And he showed us some examples of really cool web sites. I think that that is something I'd like to study. I wonder if there are courses in that sort of stuff? Oh well, that's sort of what this section of the course was about. I guess that I learned a lot, but it didn't seem like a lot of stuff because basicly it was really interesting, except for that Garfield guy who seemed weird.