Corresponding text on pages ix-4.
Welcome to the Javascript portion of this course. You should have been assigned a new book by this time, "Javascript for the World Wide Web"(right). It uses a similar format as your HTML book does so hopefully it will be easy to follow. In addition to the book, I have set up a tutorial in the following pages of this website to use as your guide. Also, check out my links page for other Javascript reference material. I would recommend that you use my website first, the book second, and the reference sites third when you are searching for information.

Caution! In addition to some practice exercises, you will be given a few quizes. All quizes in the Javascript section will be "closed internet". You can find a jillion javascripts on the WWW to copy and paste into your html document. You probably know how to do that already. The goal of this class is to teach you to write javascript, not copy it. You will be allowed to use your book and my website during the quizes but will not be allowed to search the internet. You will be given a maximum of one class day to complete each quiz.

HTML is a markup language, meaning that the code you write tells the browser how to display the page. HTML is "static", meaning that what you code into a page never changes unless you, as the author, change the code.(Note: Some professional programmers become upset when you use the word "code" to describe html tags. Since I am not a professional programmer, I could care less. I think of code as embedded instructions and html tags are certainly embedded instructions.) What HTML is, though, is static. That was fine for early webpages, but sophistication of webdesign has required "dynamic interactivity" for the user. Javascript is one way of adding dynamic interactivity.

Javascript is technically called a scripting language which is really a weak programming language. The distinction between the two is often confusing. Both provide interactivity to the user. Scripting languages tend to be simpler with only a couple of options to the user. If they do this, this other thing happens. If you come back for Trimester 3 of this course, you will work on a pure programming language, Java. Java is not Javascript, but they have some similarities in that they use similar syntax(language of coding), and they are often used on webpages.

I chose Javascript as the scripting language for this class because you need no special tools, it is relatively easy to learn, and it is all over the World Wide Web. Much like Cascading Style Sheets, most scripts are inserted directly into the <head> portion of an HTML document. Occasionally you insert Javascript into the body of the HTML document and you can even set up "external javascripts" that your html document uses. In this class, we will focus on "internal javascripts", writing them right into the html document.

>>Script Setup

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