Dr. Wayne C. Summers
Computer Science and MIS Departments
New Mexico Highlands University
Las Vegas, New Mexico 87701
E-mail: summers_wayne@ColumbusState.edu
Website: http://csc.ColumbusState.edu/summers

DHTML, CSS, XML, Perl, JavaScript, CGI, Applets!?!?!?! What does all of this mean? Web publishing has changed tremendously over the last year. Where in the past, we were concerned about HTML and getting the tags correct, there are now word processors and other WYSIWG software like Microsoft FrontPage that take the drudgery out of HTML coding. We now need to look at the next generation of web publishing, which includes using web publishing extensions like dynamic HTML (DHTML) and new languages like Extensible Markup Language (XML). This workshop will provide hands-on experience in extending web documents. Attendees will be expected to be familiar with web pages and HTML.

Home pages have traditionally been written in HTML - HyperText Markup Language. The language is written in plain text and can be written using any editor or word processor and saved as an ASCII file. To enhance the text and provide links to other documents and graphics, the developer includes tags that identify the way the text will look and directions for branching to other documents. These tags can be entered simply along with the text or can be inserted automatically if the developer uses an HTML designer.

This workshop will begin by reviewing HTML to ensure that everyone is comfortable with the standard HTML features and tags including lists and tables. The workshop will then explore both Netscape and Microsoft’s dynamic extensions to HTML (http://developer.netscape.com/library/documentation/communicator/dynhtml/index.htm and http://www.microsoft.com/gallery/files/html/) as well as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Cascading Style Sheets provides a user-friendly way to format documents for the web. Dynamic HTML allows developers to support interactivity and sophisticated animation without a lot of hard programming. Participants will have an opportunity to include these extensions in their web documents.

The workshop will also focus on the newest web publishing language - Extensible Markup Language (XML) (http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-xml.html, which is designed to be the next generation of a language for web publishing. As described by the designers: "The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple dialect of SGML, which is completely described in this document. The goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML."

The workshop will conclude with a discussion of how these extensions can be used in the classroom. This discussion will include a look at what other educators are doing. The author has been teaching Internet and web publishing courses for over four years in the U.S. and internationally. For the last three years, he has been invited to conduct Chautauquas to university faculty for the National Science Foundation. A compendium of his work can be found on his web pages at http://csc.ColumbusState.edu/summers.