In-class presentations

For the first few weeks of the term we are going to dedicate the last 30 minutes of each class to short student presentations. The subject of these presentations will be assorted topics in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I will select the topics, and you will be required to research the topic, prepare some examples, and then give a thirty minute presentation on the topic.

These presentations will all be partner projects - you will be working on the presentation with one partner of your choice.

The topics

Here is a list of presentation topics. The list is currently incomplete - I will be adding additional topics shortly.

1) Entities and Character Sets - Tuesday, April 4

• Give some more information about HTML entities. Where can you find a more complete list of entities?
• Describe what a character set is, and how you can use a particular character set in a web page.
• Discuss some common examples of character sets, such as ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8.
• Show how using a character set such as UTF-8 makes it easy to put special characters in a web page without using elements.

2) Semantic Elements - Thursday, April 6

• Give an overview of the new semantic elements in HTML 5, such as section, article, and nav.
• Explain why using these elements as an alternative to the generic div is useful.
• Show some examples of these elements in use in a page.

3) Multimedia in HTML - Tuesday, April 11

• Demonstate how to use the HTML 5 video element to embed videos directly in a web page.
• Explain what an iframe is, and how to use an iframe to embed video players from services like YouTube in a page.
• Demonstrate how to embed an audio player in a web page.

4) More about text in CSS - Thursday, April 13

• Give an overview of CSS properties that can affect the appearance of text.
• Show how to use the Google Fonts service to embed fonts in a web page.

5) Multicolumn layouts and background images in CSS - Tuesday, April 18

• Demonstrate how to set up a multi-column layout in CSS.
• Show how to use background images in CSS to make a page more attractive.
• Demonstrate how to use background images to create decorative borders on a page.

6) Classes in JavaScript - Thursday, April 20

• Read chapter 6 in the JavaScript book
• Give a summary of how to set up and use a class in JavaScript.
• Write a demonstration program that shows an example of a JavaScript class in use.

7) Modules in JavaScript - Tuesday, April 25

• Read chapter 10 in the JavaScript book
• Give a summary of how to set up and use a module in JavaScript.
• Write a demonstration program that consists of multiple files in which some of the files are modules loaded by other files.

8) Local storage - Thursday, April 27

• Research the local storage facility in JavaScript online.
• Show an example to demonstrate how you can use local storage to pass information from one page to another.
• Show an example to demonstrate how you can use local storage to save data in a page that gets restored when the user reopens the page later.

9) Additional React components - Tuesday, May 2

• Find a source online for React components.
• Write a demonstration program that uses some of these components.