The assignment doesn't call for sophisticated formatting and positioning, so chances are you won't run into any major problems. Browsers today have very good stylesheet support but it is not complete and varies from browser to browser.
Internet Explorer on Macs seem to be the most difficult one to handle. Borders are often thicker when they are not given in absolute values in the stylesheet. Potential problems often arise when the widths and height are specified. It sometimes requires a creative work-around to get a page working.
Since IE is a more difficult browser, it's suggested to start editing the stylesheet with this browser as a reference. Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox and Safari work very well and turn out pretty much the same. (Safari has the most limited stylesheet support of these browsers.)
Internet Explorer is buggy when it comes to floating properties. If you want to 'float' and image left or right of a text paragraph, it may only work if you assign a width to the image container. This is incorrect behavior and will cause problems with other browsers. The easiest way to align your images is to center them.
Incidentally, Mac- and Windows-based version of IE are based on completely different text rendering engines. If a stylesheet works on Windows, it's no guarantee that it will work on a Mac.
A tricky part in division-based layouts is to get them lined up vertically and horizontally. One way of doing this is to give them width and/or height. This will partition a page into as many <div>s as are specified. Within the boxes, text will flow left top to bottom right and extend the box downward. Fixed-size objects such as images will not be cropped but extend the width or height of a box as needed.
To visually test the extend if a <div>, set the background-color to something bright and noticable. Color is always a good way to see if a style rule is read by the browser. If it is not, chances are there is a syntax error in the stylesheet.
lynx and links are text browsers that barely support any formatting. Hence, there is not much to worry about. But some consideration should be given to how images are handled. They should take the text string found in the images alt attribute and place it where the image link is located in the source page. If an image is placed inline with text, that text string will appear right within the text with no special formatting. In other words, there is no visual distinction between text and image description. This may be confusing.
To handle such a situation, the image should be placed in its own block container. If this is not possible, the text string of the alt attribute should at least be formatted in such a way that it becomes apparent that it replace an image.
lynx is installed on the CS network. To run it, ssh to a CS machine and type
lynx url_of_web_page
The Space bar on your keyboard scrolls down a page; up and down arrows let you select links.
g url_of_web_page
will fetch another page, and typing 'q' quits the program.
The Perl programming assignment is not very complicated, but may be a bit confusing for programming novices. The code you are supposed to add has to do the following things:
Variable assignment is a simple, one-line statement. Comparing user input and performing a subsequent action requires a conditional statement block.
There are three possible conditions:
The program loop provided for you in the source script will take care of the fetching the input and will keep the programming running until the user types 'q'. Your conditional statement block has to do two different kinds of comparisons: it has to compare the input to a number (your 'magic number') and to a string (the letter 'q').
Perl uses two different operators for number and string comparisons, '==' and 'eq', respectively. (Both operators stand for 'equals'.) If one of these comparisons results in 'true', an appropriate action must follow. Otherwise, the program must indicate somehow that the comparison results were negative.