Aspies For Freedom

Hello all,
Over in the Poetry/creative writing forums we've been discussing the idea of a literary and art magazine for autistics.  We've finalized a few plans, and the next step to begin making this real is to get a website up and running.  But none of us literary types over there has the skill or means to make one.
So we thought we'd ask around over here.
So, what about it?  Any of you interested?  We can give you more details about what's needed from the design if you want to do it.

(You'd really only need to do the deisgn and explain to whoever we put in charge how to work it- you wouldn't need to actually run it, though you might have to do occasional maintanence)

I ought to write an HTML made simple book.

Here's what I'd say

1.  Start with XML, the granddaddy of all tag-based hierarchies of things and how they relate to each other.  It's not that hard, really, something like
<family>
<surname>Marsh</surname>
<humanbeing>
    <name>Robert Marsh</name>
    <age>Deceased</age>
    <relationshipstatus>Married</relationshipstatus>
</humanbeing>
<humanbeing>
     <name>Rachel Marsh</name>
     <age>Deceased</age>
     <relationshipstatus>Widowed</relationshipstatus>
</humanbeing>
<humanbeing>
     <name>Chris Marsh</name>
     <age>37</age>
     <relationshipstatus>Are you kidding?</relationshipstatus>
</humanbeing>
<humanbeing>
     <name>Tim Marsh</name>
     <age>34</age>
     <relationshipstatus>Like I'd tell my brother?</relationshipstatus>
</humanbeing>
</family>

More to come

2.  I would then teach the fundamentals of grammar (paragraph, levels of headers, ordered lists, data tables, images) because HTML was created by Tim Berners-Lee for scientists to share research papers with.   If HTML or style sheets looks too much like American Psychological Association publication style, that's why.

3.  I would teach HTML as a tag-based descendant of XML originally intended for academic research purposes.  Paragraphs, headers, tables, images, lists and list items, are all elements with tags (<p></p>, <h1></h1>, <table></table> and so on).  According to proper
XML rules, please get into the disciplined habit of closing whatever tag you open.  Elements can live inside elements (a <table> has one or more rows <tr> with one or more columns of cells <td>, a list <ul> or <ol> has at least one list item <li>, and so on).  

An element is a thing that holds content.

4.  I would also teach the accessibility features of the HTML language that help screen readers like JAWS navigate for a person with inadequate or no vision (there are attributes for the HTML "element" tags that help tie, literally, data cells to header cells in tables, form controls and their labels, and so on, and JAWS is looking for these tags and communicates their standardized meanings to the disabled user).

5.  I would teach style sheets as an abbreviated way to give orders to all the elements in a Web page.

body { color: black; background-color: white;}  = hey everybody, you are black text on a white background

exceptions can be programmed in, however, subsequently

p { color: blue; background-color: white; }

Paragraphs, now you are blue text on a white background.  Everybody else, never mind.

More to come....

6.  Javascript is a useful way, a true programming language, not a content schema, that lets you control the behavior of elements on a Web page (especially the elements of a <form> element: <input>, <select>, <textarea>, by name of element or by number in a collection of elements in a document) in response to an action a user performs on an object (if an <input type="button"> object element gets clicked on, its onClick() procedure fires, making changes to other elements in the document)

7.  Server-side languages
     a. Cold Fusion and Active Server Pages

    Cold Fusion is another programming language that is written into the server computer, not your Web browser like style sheets and Javascript.  ASP is the same but is either Perl, Visual BASIC, or server-side Javascript.  Server-side code means you, the user in cyberspace, can NEVER see it.  Only us techies with authorized (or unauthorized) access.

     The MOST IMPORTANT THING about SERVER SIDE LANGUAGES is that THEY CAN WRITE HTML based on the value of a form, the value of information in a database, or anything.  For example, a frequent use of Cold Fusion and ASP is to fill an HTML data table with the contents of a query read from one or more database tables.  

     These languages can also

     (1) add, update, and read information from databases, and in the case of reading information, put it in a QUERY you can read in a
loop.  Usually related to things users enter in a form. (See SQL for the details of server side query languages, to read, add, and edit table information and create a selective representation of one or more of the columns of one table, or of more tables joined to one another.)
     (2) set and read the contents of non-persistent cookies (they live in your browser's memory, and die when you exit the program.  Older cookies lived on your hard drive after you powered down but the Federal government says these are intrusive to citizen privacy)

The combination of 1 and 2, for example, lets you provide password security for an unlimited number of web pages.  You enter the password and user name, a query on a subsequent .cfm page checks a table for the number of table records with columns matching the password and user name fields, if the value is 1, it sets a cookie in browser memory and lets you pass, if the value is 0, you are not authorized or you forgot your password, and you are denied access)

     (3) modules and includes can reuse the same HTML and CFM or ASP code again and again and again, ad naseum, so you can make headers and footers that NEVER change between pages, always consistent, or YOU CAN MAKE AN INCLUDE THAT PASSWORD PROTECTED PAGES READ, looking for the cookie in your browser's memory, and throwing you to a log in or error page if no cookie is found.
     (4) other statements let you write email and even grab from, to, subject, and content from email (which you might want to stuff in a database)
     (5) other statements let you create, write, rename, delete, and copy files, or to stuff all the content of an ASCII (plain text) file (almost all Web pages, language programs, style sheets, SQL and so on are ASCII files) into a variable for processing
     (6) regular expressions let you search text in a variable for pattern matches (such as to verify the legitimacy of an email address)
     (7) CFM or ASP code in the action="" part of a FORM can perform server-side validation if the user has no Javascript or has turned it off, so you can still check email addresses or that a field is completed properly)


The lesson is that you start small with XML and HTML, go to style sheets and Javascript, and then move on to server side scripts that can bring life to old dull Web pages that are only content organized in a meaningful way (to a Web browser).

1.  People created the HTML language standard.
2.  Other people wrote programs to read HTML (Web browsers)
3.  Still other people write Web pages to be read by the world

Computer languages are a social agreement.  
There are formal standards for proper HTML, style sheets, and Javascript, not to mention the Secton 508 requirements for accessible HTML and W3C recommendations for helpful HTML.  Learn the standards and live by them and the largest number of Web users on planet Earth will thank you.

You should provide some more details, such as:

(1) What needs to be done? To design a website is not necessarily the same as coding it, which is not necessarily the same as building a content management system. Do you need all the three, i.e. design (layout, colors, images, what have you?) and markup (html and css) and server-side code (php, asp, ruby, python, java, what have you) or do you only need some of it?
(2) What resources do you have? What web server, what available programming environment etc...

Also, GuessWho, the granddaddy of all tag-based hierarchies of things would probably be GML, an ancestor of SGML, which is an ancestor of XML and HTML. GML looked like this:

According to wikipedia.

Right, Simen, thanks.

Yes yes yes!  If you have .asp server, incredible, because you can reuse code for headers and footers.  In HTML you can't.

I've been working on a Labor agency's pathetic attempt at a succession of PDFs in HTML.  Not only are they doing it in HTML and every single template change has to be done 50-100 times over, but the idiots wrote the style sheet with a bunch of SPAN tags.  Great!  Now you have JAWS reading the screen for you because you have poor vision, how is JAWS going to know which are the headers and which are the paragraphs?

New meaning for "Good enough for government work?"

I presume you would want all the poems in the same look and feel, in other words, consistent headers and footers.  That is kicking, screaming, and begging for modularization in Cold Fusion or ASP.  Either that way or the painful way, you can change ALL the styles at once if you use ONE style sheet and link ALL the Web pages to it.  

But for heaven's sake, please use proper HTML tags so JAWS or Firefox can help the user navigate.

That's it, enough Federal baloney, going home.

1.  We need 'em all.
2.  If we have any of that stuff (and I don't think we do), I certainly don't know about it, and if I did, I couldn't tell you about any of it because I don't know anything about it at all.  My expertise with computers extends to using them to surf the web and a few other things.  That's it.
As you can see, we really don't know how to go abot doing this.  That's why we thought it wise to seek out help.

I have no clue what any of Guess Who's posts mean, either.

You need to get a web host. If you had the money and expertise, you could setup a server at your home or wherever, but since you don't, you should hire space and bandwidth from a hosting company. When you say you don't have "any of that stuff", meaning a server and a programming environment, no one can help you. You need to have server space in order to have a website, and you need to have some kind of programming environment if you're going to serve anything other than static (i.e., unchanging) web pages. Until you get those, you just can't make a website. It's that simple.

Once you've got a host, you need to get a domain name, unless you got that with a host.

Until then, there's not much point in asking for help, if you're not looking for someone to pay for it.

We thought the website could be made & ready to go online before we had a server.  We want this to go as quickly as possible, so we hoped someone could get started working on the site while we shopped around for, um...  all that stuff.
(my flimsy grasp of the concept becomes ever more obvious....)

With no idea what kind of environment you have, it's not possible.

Further, you have given no description of what exactly needs to be done. I'm guessing you need a content management system of some sort. So what content is there to be managed?

Just a wide overview of Web design taught in logical progression.  It is important to know what HTML was intended for.  The people who wrote JAWS and Firefox intended that if a designer typed in <H1></H1> he or she meant a level one header.  If you misuse the tags you will confuse a JAWS user.

Using the right tags is the first thing.
Making sure that a validator checks the code and says it is valid is important.  Then, all the Web browsers on earth will not have a problem.

Once you have valid and accessible HTML and valid style sheets, you can take advantage of server-side scripts to write valid and accessible HTML, too.  

Sorry for the confusion, but it is important if you do it, do it right.

I've stated earlier my willingness to fund the design of the web site that would hold the prizmatik as long as the cost could be kept at some kind of minimum in the league of a low three digit sum of usdollars. The way I see it we'd have to establish contact with person/s willing to do this kind of job before so I/we know where to send what kind of money is needed to start the design process in the 1st place.

Does this clear things up?

Umm, not really....  Seeing as I have no clue what's going on at all, do you think you could do it on your own?  I'm not very competent when it comes to computers, or, indeed, anything related to them, I don't think I could even figure out how to buy a domain name (if you even buy them.  Do you?).

I meant my post as a reply to Simen + any other who might be willing to help. Luai, I thought you where multiple times better with computers than I am. I think so about everyone that's a teenager today that they're basically brought up in the age of internet and knows far more than I.

I do not get it. What exactly has to be done?
I can do some design stuff, webside layout or interface 'programming', but have never learned it by professional education. So it would be possibly not as perfect as it could be in some cases. Additionaly I am not a friend of markup languages and stick to plain HTML + PHP if possible.

If interested, E-Mail me.