Semester 2

The last few weeks of semester 1 went by in a blur of project deadlines & exam revision. My lecture notes are a bit cryptic even to me at this stage so there's not much point in trying to write updates for each week. The projects & exams went well, so looking forward now to the challenge of semester 2.

Week 1 has already come & gone, so a quick update. The modules this time around are:

• Web Application Development
• Rich Internet Applications 
• Project 

We also have an hour each Friday evening on CareerBridge - advice & techniques on building an effective CV, developing an online presence, networking; all things I need a bit of work on.

As the first week wasn't much more than introduction to the new modules, there isn't much to write about. There was at least one thing I learned though that I thought was interesting.  We were tasked in the Web App Dev module with prefixing a currency amount with the euro symbol by means of the CSS file. I was thinking that the euro symbol would constitute content as opposed to presentation, so why would it go in the stylesheet? The only way I could think of was to put the euro symbol into the xml file. Anyway, was advised by the lab assistant to look up the :before and :after selectors. Using these selectors means you can specify an element and add additional content, so that for example an element that appears in an xml file as <price>10.99</price> will appear in the browser as €10.99 when you use the following CSS code:

PRICE:before { content: "€"; }