An essential reference and a bonus quiz!

Jake Howlett, 6 June 2001

Category: Miscellaneous; Keywords: colour css html

If you are anything like me then you may like to think of yourself as more of an Internet Developer than purely a Domino Developer. If nothing else, the former is probably a better way to explain what you do when talking to somebody outside of IT.

When do you get to the point that you can honestly say this? A tricky one! I would say it was when you get to the point that you can create a whole site from top to bottom (that looks professional of course) completely on your own.

Doing this is not going to be a case of simply using Domino. It is going to require, at least, a graphics package, a decent HTML editor and maybe even a CSS tool. These are not always enough though. What we need is a list of all the on-line resources out there that are packed with information and resources. One such site is Visibone.com, a one man show much like CodeStore, this site is the home of the "Color Lab". Here you can dynamically pick and choose from the 256 colours and see what they look like together. This is one of the first things I do when starting a new site - choose a colour scheme. If you want to have a look, click on the illustration below:

This is not all that is to be found on the site either. There are also HTML Code reference charts and links to interesting articles about design.

So, if you really want to call yourself an Internet Designer, maybe it's time to start taking visual design just as seriously as the coding. To go one step further and start thinking about the more important aspect of usability there is no better place to start that on Jakob Nielson's Useit.com.

Are you an Internet Developer or just a Domino Developer?

Take this simple quiz to find out:

Question 1 What is a span tag most commonly used for?

A way of telling the page to fill the whole browser
A way applying a style class to single pieces of text
A way to merge the cells in a table
A way to apply HTML attributes to multiple tags

Question 2 What does #ff0000; mean to you?

It's the ASCII code for the ampersand character
It's the CSS color code for blue
It's the CSS color code for red
It means nothing to me at all

Question 3 Which of these @Functions will not work on the web?

@Command([EditDocument]);
@DBCommand()
@Command([FileCloseWindow]);
@Command([EditGoToField]);

Question 4 Netscape supports the valign attribute of the <tr> tag

True
False

Question 5 What does the <ul> tag do?

Tells the text within it to be underlined
Creates a unique list
Created an unordered list
Tells the text within it be a uniform length

Question 6 When does a page's onload event occur?

When the page and its images have completely loaded
When the page is displayed but is still waiting for any images
As soon as the browser receives a response from the server
When the page has loaded and the user has given it focus

Question 7 What is the URL Encode of the ? character?

%3F
%20
%25
There isn't one as it is a special URL character

Question 8 If you know the path of a file on the user's PC you can tell the file upload where to get it using JavaScript?

True
False

Question 9 What's Opera?

The W3C's web standards program
An HTML authoring program
An open-source Java web server
A web browser

Question 10 Which of these can't be used as a JSP container?

WebSphere
Domino R6
Apache Tomcat
Netscape Web Server

Mark My Answers

Percentage:

>70% - Great. You can now say "Internet Developer"
>30% - Better. You can now say "Domino Developer"
>0 % - Not bad. Still need to say "Notes Developer"

If you disagree entirely with this and/or have been offended. Sorry.... you can leave your grievances here.

If you are wondering how I wrote this quiz, and haven't already cheated by looking at the source, you can find out here.