This week we were assigned to visit and critique the websites www.w3.com and www.w3/schools. Let me just say that I thought the w3 (otherwise known as the World Wide Web Consortium) website, was awesome. It is set in a 3-column format and even though it contains a vast amount of information, it still gives the impression of being uncluttered. It was really easy to navigate around the site. I was interested to read in one of the more recent briefs posted that there is currently a program in development called EmotionML, which is a markup language that it going to take user emotion and personality into account. I think this concept is kind of mind-boggling and can only imagine what imlications it could end up having. I also read up on the member organizations that comprise the W3. I was interested to see that Mitre was one of the founding members of the Consortium, and I say that because my dad works for Mitre; it was neat to get his perspective on some of the information I obtained from the W3 site. I also read up on the history of the W3 and of the web in general. I am absoluely in awe of people like Tim Berners-Lee.
The other site we visited contained links for various tutorials, and I ran though those for HTML, XHTML, CSS, and the tutorial on building a website. Again, the site itself was extremely user friendly, all of the links to the tutorials appeared in the left column of the home page and the design was clean and free of needless distractions. The tutorials themselves were great. Clearly geared toward the novice web designer. I feel like I would have been able to follow them fine even if I hadn’t already had some background knowledge under my belt.