Students will be expected to nominate in advance examples of good web sites. In the workshop they will have to defend their nominations.
Having considered examples of good sites, we will tackle the (possibly easier) question as to what makes a bad site. Again, each student must nominate a website which they consider to be an example of a bad site and be prepared to justify their choice.
There are a number of widgets that can be used on forms to input information. There are trade-offs in using one or another. In this workshop we will discuss the relative merits of the different widgets.
We will look interactively at form-handling in PHP.
This will be followed by an exercise which follows on from the Form usability exercise. What constitutes a correct version of each of the input types, and how best to check them? What checks are appropriate and practical on the client side and the server side?
In this workshop we will undertake some exercises to practise accessing mySQL databases from PHP. This is optional, for those students who have attended the lectures on mySQL.
In the previous exercise, we looked at the kind of checking that can be performed on forms. One of the uses of client-side processing, using JavaScript is to perform such checking - and give immediate feedback to the visitor.
11 March 2009