Critical Evaluation:

Introduction:

This page provides a critical evaluation of Northumbria Book Club website, by looking at general theory and practice, and demonstrating the publisher knowledge of tools used to publisher the website with justifying the use of these tools, taking into consideration the publisher own experience. The critical evaluation will look at different sections describing tools used in order to design the website as what was required. The document will illustrate the use of cascading style sheet (CSS) as a means of separating style of the website from its content, the use of XHTML and how its validated, defining PHP language and its usefulness , an explanation of SQL statement and it functions, description of different Browser compatibility, and finally explaining current disability legislations.

Cascading style sheet (CSS):

CSS is defined as "A way of rendering the style of a web page from multiple sources with a defined order of precedence where the definitions of any style element conflict" (Glossary of Library and Computer Terms) CSS is a means of separating the content of an html document from the style and layout of that document (VORD Web Design).
I found that CSS is very useful to be used for designing the style and layout a webpage because of many reasons:
• CSS helps on changing the layout of the webpage and positions of texts, pictures, tables, or any thing in the website very easily. Theses changes can be made by altering the CSS file, with out worrying about the XTML or PHP files.
• CSS facilitate minimizing the html file size, which quicker downloading the webpage, because CSS is separate for the html fie.
• CSS provides accessibility to a websites by allowing the user to look at the content of the webpage which is written in a separate file rather that looking at every thing included designing the webpage.
On the other hand, limitations of CSS lies on that CSS doesn’t work consistently in different browsers. Microsoft Internet Explorer support CSS in a pretty logical way. Unfortunately IE logic does not conform to current CSS standards (VORD Web Design).

XHTML and its validations:

XHTML is s stricter, cleaner version of HTML, intended to replace the HTML 4.01 standard. It stands for extensible Hypertext Mark-up Language, and is an application of XML (Leafish, 2004-2008). Validating a website is defined as "a process of checking your documents against a formal Standard, such as those published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for HTML and XML-derived Web document types, or by the WapForum for WML, etc" (W3C,1994-2007). Validating a website play a similar role as spell checking and proofreading for grammar and syntax. More over validation is a reliable process because it deals with "precisely-specified machine languages, not with nebulously-defined human natural language" (W3C, 19942007). The W3C website is the main validation software that validates webpage. W3C provides three main tools used to validate and test a webpage: (W3C, 1994-2006).
• The MarkUp Validator: Also known as the HTML validator, it helps check Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML, SVG or MathML.
• The Link Checker - Checks anchors (hyperlinks) in a HTML/XHTML document. Useful to find broken links, etc.
• The CSS Validator - validates CSS style sheets or documents using CSS style sheets".

PHP Language:

PHP was first created in 1994 by "Rasmue Lerdorft" to track the visitors to his online resume. PHP is known as "Personal Home Page" (Ullman, 2003). PHP considered as a usefulness and capable programme, where people started to use it more in professional situations. That led PHP to be called "Hypertext Processor" (Ullman, 2003).PHP is designed to do something only after an event occurs, e.g, when a server submits a form or goes to a URL. Ullman (2003) added to definitions to PHP, where he considered PHP as a server –side, and cross-platform technology. Server –side: refers to "the fact theta every thing PHP does occurs on the server (as opposed to ton client, which is the web site viewer’s computer)" (Ullman, 2003). Cross-platform: means that PHP "runs on most operating systems, including Windows, UNIX, and Macintosh" (Ullman, 2003). PHP is a language used to develop dynamic website, and it’s better, faster, and easier to learn and use than other programming languages. Ullman (2003) stated that PHP is one of that best programming languages that combines between the ease with which programmers can begin using it and the ability for more advanced programmers to do everything they require. There are many software’s used to facilitate writing the PHP language. According to my experience in writing the PHP language, I found that the use of "PHP Edit" software is more useful on writing PHP codes than other software’s such as "SciTE". Whereas as , PHP Edit provides automatically the first code the need to be written for HTML in addition, it is easier to write PHP in PHP edit because it ease the movements in and out the code .

Structure Query Language (SQL):

There are different definitions for SQL explained by different authors:
• SQL is defined as "A database server, normally used with PHP, which gives Internet users a way to access information stored in a database "(Control Panel Support).
• SQL - (Structured Query Language) "is a standard interactive and programming language for getting information from and updating a database"(GreyFoxWebWorks,2006-2007)
According to my experience in using SQL Statements, I believe that the use of SQL statements facilitated the understating of the required and relevant information needed for displaying data in a webpage. With the use of SQL statements the user can specify what type of information are needed displaying them in a particular order, as well as using particular words or functions to control what to display. For example : functions like "WHERE ", "ORDERBY", "INNER JOIN" allow the user to display data in a table by choosing in what order the data will be displayed , and combining two or more table s to choose between different field to be placed in the table.

Browser Compatibility:

A web browser is known as a translation advice .A web browser takes what ever is written in HTML language and translates it into the designed webpage (Dahm, 1996-2007). There are different types of browsers, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Netscape Browser. All different browse have different versions, the newer version of a particular browser is generally better at displaying Web pages than an old one (Dahm, 1996-2007). Disability Legislation: Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) is an act published to ensures that websites are accessible to blind and disabled users.

References:

Control Panel Support. Available at: http://64.176.35.12/glossary.html (Accessed: 23 May 2008).
Dahm, T. (1996-2007) NetMechanic. Available at:
http://www.netmechanic.com/products/Browser-Tutorial.shtml#1.1
(Accessed: 22 May 2008)
Glossary of Library and Computer Terms . Available at:
http://www.wyla.org/workshops/printer_friendly/terms.shtml#C (Accessed: 23 May 2008).
Grey Fox Web Works (2006-2007). Available at:
http://www.greyfoxwebworks.com/webterms.html (Accessed: 24 May 2008).
LeaFish (2004-2008). Available at:
www.leafish.co.uk/glossary (Accessed: 24 May 2008).
Ullman, L. (2003) PHP AND MySQL : For Daynamic Web Sites.Berkeley:Peachipt Press.
Vord Web Design. Available at:
http://www.vordweb.co.uk/css/advantages-of-css.htm (Accessed: 23 May 2008).
W3C Quality Assurance Tools (1994-2006).
Available at:
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/ (Accessed: 24 May 2008).
W3C Mark-up Validation Services (1994-2007).
Available at:
http://validator.w3.org/docs/why.html (Accessed: 25 May 2008).

Web Credible (2008). Available at: http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/uk-website-legal-requirements.shtml
(Accessed: 26 May 2008).