We have many great speakers contributing their time for WordCamp Fayetteville 2011! We’ve asked each of them to share a bit about their topic and presentation to let you know just what you’ll have in store. This blog entry is from Tom Hapgood, a professor at the University of Arkansas and is a repost from his own blog. Hapgood will also be presenting with fellow professor Bret Schulte about the U of A’s student publication Arkansas Angle.
Tom Hapgood
I’ll be speaking at WordCampFayetteville 2011 at the end of July, organized by Christopher Spencer of Ozarks Unbound and some others. The title of my presentation hearkens back to the “heady” days of the 80s hair styles: “Embrace the Mullet: CSS is the Party in the Back (a CSS ‘how-to’)” that I alluded to very briefly last year during my presentation at this same event.
The jist is that a web page many times is made up of a structural HTML document (the more business-like/boring part that comprises the structural markup code) and a CSS document (the “party in the back” that provides the page with the fun stuff: color, layout, fonts, drop shadows, etc.) In the HTML you can wrap some text in a paragraph tag. Then, in the CSS you can tell the text in that paragraph tag, or all paragraph tags, to be bold, red with the “Homemade Apple” font, for instance.
I’m very familiar with both concepts, having been in the web design business since the boom of the mid-to-late 90s and having had a mullet during the mullet-boom of the early-to-mid 80s.
During the presentation, I’ll deal with the basics of Cascading Style Sheets in WordPress, such as structure vs. presentation, the box model, basic selectors, a simple page layout and some new/upcoming features of CSS3 such as basic responsive animation.
