Applying Skills Learned

“Applying Skills Learned” Please respond to the following:

From the e-Activity, explain what you learned about the Website you selected by looking at the source code. (i.e., the version of HTML that was used, comment tags, if the head elements were marked, and if so, the type of information they contained.)

Back in Week 1, I chose to analyze www.federalreserve.gov, the public site for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (my employer). I took another look at the site, and realized that the site actually uses tables to manage the layout. I didn’t notice this the first time I viewed the page source. I also learned that the site uses VideoJS as the media player.

Thinking back to the first week when you performed this task, assess your knowledge and growth. Based on what you have learned, provide recommendations for improvement to the source code.

If I were redesigning www.federalreserve.gov, I would upgrade the site to HTML5 and CSS3 and I wouldn’t use tables to manage the layout. I would leverage the HTML5 layouts to handle page layout.

Reference: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_layout.asp

The discussion about Internet Explorer is very interesting. I don’t know how many of us are currently employed as web designers/developers, or employed in another area of the IT industry, but I thought I’d toss in my “two-cents”, as a “professional”. 22 years of experience as a web application developer, and I’ve experienced how dramatically the Web and web-related technologies have evolved considerable since the early days (1990s).

IE has definitely improved its compliance with W3C standards, and that’s largely due to increased completion from companies like Apple and Google, and open source organizations like Mozilla. Microsoft finally realized that maintaining IE’s non-compliance just didn’t make sense, when there were other browsers that were simply better. We’ll see how Edge performs.

I use Edge on my Windows 10 machine for school because that’s my default browser and it works fine for this purpose. But if I want to access my email, calendar, YouTube and such, I go right to Chrome because Google has single-sign on and I can access everything from within Chrome. If I’m listening to music or watching TV, I use my Kindle Fire, but the Silk browser is terrible, and the Kindle’s caching drives me mad, so I don’t use it to surf.

And what about wearables? How will we use these to access the Internet?

I share this to suggest that the browser has become increasingly more invisible to users, especially with advances in mobile computing. More of us are accessing the web via multiple devices, depending on where we are and why we’re accessing the Web.