How I learned English :-)
A couple of days ago I caught a rerun of The Golden Girls - and I have to admit, I love the show. First, it is just really funny - Dorothy rocks! The other reason why I like it is because it taught me colloquial English (together with The Cosby Show). Growing up in Germany, almost everything on TV was dubbed, there was almost no way to hear anything in original language, and while I appreciate it for non-English languages, I would have loved to see more TV in English.
Luckily, Cologne was close enough to the Netherlands so we actually were able to receive a couple of Dutch channels. There was too much on that I cared for - I am pretty sure it was public television mostly showing news and Dutch TV shows, but they did air The Golden Girls and The Cosby Shows - and boy am I glad it was those shows. Not only are they fun, I also believe that both use relatively proper and well pronounced English. In addition, they had Dutch subtitles and while I don’t speak Dutch, it often helped to figure out something I didn’t understand.
I was an English major in high school, mostly because I wasn’t able to pick German as my first major but had to pick a foreign language or a science. I picked English because it is pretty much like German class but in a different language. And boy, did I NOT do well. I remember that my teacher Mrs. Hellmund while handing out the graded papers said “You start out nicely but after about a page you are really losing it” to which I replied that I’ll try to stick with one page the next time. My biggest issue was that I tried to construct my English sentences like my German sentences but then I got lost in the grammar. The first page was find because it was just the intro. Once I reached the interpretation part, my brain took off but my language skills did not follow.
Now, on a completely different note, in Germany there are always those people who tell you that you have to watch this movie or read that book in original language and I always think it’s bull. Yeah, if your English is very very good, you may be able to pick up on some nuances that may not have been translated well into German but to be honest, for the vast majority speaking high school English - they lose a lot more information due to the lack of vocabulary than they gain by hearing the original language.
And of course, the recommendation usually comes from someone who is convinced that “he can English very good”. Most of the time, I find this recommendation pompous and condescending and I would never recommend it to anyone who wants to watch a movie for entertainment. Now if someone wants to improve their English, it’s a great idea - worked for me, right?
Compare the HTML Server controls to Web controls (ASP.NET controls).
As I pointed out in the answer to the first question, HTML server controls are HTML controls with the runat attribute set to “server”. They are an easy way to create server-side code when you already know HTML. Unfortunately, since they are based on HTML their abilities are still limited.
Web controls are more advanced and they are not based on HTML anymore but on the Web control class. Some of the Web controls look like old style HTML controls but there are additional controls that include new functions. Web controls have several other advantages, for example they are able to determine the browser client agent. In HTML, you had to figure out a way to be compatible with one browser without breaking the code for another browser. Web controls are able to render their functionality automatically depending on the client agent.
Most Web controls can also fully use themes and templates to match the controls to the look and feel determined by CSS.
Compare the benefits of using HTML Server controls with using HTML controls.
HTML controls are part of the HTML language. You can use and address them in client-side scripting but not from the server side.
From what I understand, almost every HTML control can be converted to a server control by using the <runat=”server”> tag in the HTML code on your ASPX code which signals the server that this control is server-side. On page load, the server control generates the code for the control and sends it to the browser.
HTML server controls have the advantage of retaining status (viewstate) - that means, the server knows if the checkbox is checked or not and if an option is selected or not. This is particularly helpful if you refresh a pages or go back to it. A regular HTML control would be reset to the state in the HTML code. An HTML server control on the other hand checks with the server and the server will tell the page, that the user had selected option B and that the name entered in the text field was Susanne. With an HTML server control, the code for the control and the code behind is executed on the server but it can interact with client-side code.
HTML server controls seem to be the in-between step between old-fashioned HTML controls which don’t do much and are purely client-side and fancier Web controls or ASP.NET controls. The resemble HTML controls and make the transition from a static HTML page to a server driven ASP page easier. ASP.NET controls are not based on HTML anymore and are basically a new programming language that you have to learn.
What are the benefits of using the style sheet in a large company or educational institution?
I “grew up” teaching HTML to myself, and coding HTML pages manually. I didn’t know much of structure and presentation layer, and I happily mixed HTML and presentation elements together to create a big messy code stew. I remember when I first saw the CSS function in Dreamweaver and I thought that it was stupid - why would I define the look of a page element somewhere else instead of right with the very element? Well, I learned why when I decided to change the look of my website and I had to change every single element of presentation manually. CSS at first glance was terribly confusing and I didn’t feel I really _need_ it. Over the years I thought it would be nice to know CSS and I especially liked the possibilities of positioning elements with precision. Having to use tables to arrange items on a webpage always seemed awkward to me. But it would also mean having to forget everything I knew about HTML and start over. When I started at Davenport, the first class I took was CISP110 (Web Page Development) and when I looked at the book I was happy as a clam that I would finally learn CSS. Now, enough of the babble, why don’t I just answer the question?
A CSS (or Cascading Style Sheet) is a file that holds the presentational layer of a web page and thereby separates formatting from content. In a large company - and an educational institution is usually just that - it is extremely important to use CSS. It helps to keep a unified corporate image across all parts of the web page.
Often, different people work on different parts of the web site, someone may be in charge of the customer service pages while someone else takes care of the product index - the equivalent in an educational institution would be the different departments for example the Computer Science department vs. Marketing Department etc. Instead of formatting web pages manually, the formatting would be set by a CSS while the code only defined elements or regions. If you think of a web site and its different sections, they all have a similar feel to it. Most have the same page head and page footer, similar side bars and the overall fonts and color schemes are the same throughout.
Now, consider that a company changes their corporate color scheme. While I am usually a strong believer in the power of color, there are several reasons to change your corporate color scheme. One of them, I experienced with the company I work for. We used to have orange and light grey as our corporate colors, so our links were orange, backgrounds and headers were grey etc. Some years ago, we bought another company and we decided to show off the merger in combining our two business colors. Their color was dark blue, so we decided to change our corporate color from orange and grey to orange and blue. If our web site had not separated content from presentation, someone would have to go through every single page and change the color value from color=”grey” to color=”blue” - and that on thousands of pages on fonts, backgrounds, borders etc. Using a style sheet, the whole thing would take minutes and only a single file would need to be edited in a few places. Not only is this an incredible time saver, it is also a lot less likely to cause errors and ommissions. Now, of course it isn’t THAT easy, but I think it drives home the point well. Of course, we decided a little later that orange and blue really didn’t look that great and we went back to orange and grey 
There are a lot of great examples on the web to display the power of stylesheets, the most famous is probably the Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/) which can have a totally new look just by switching to a different CSS file.
How is HTML different than XHTML? Which one you would prefer to use in new Web projects and why?
XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) is an extension of the HTML language. Regular HTML is based on SGML - which is a very complex and difficult to follow syntax. With XHTML, the W3C switched to a different code base, the much simpler XML syntax. HTML was always very open and most browsers were able to acceptably render non-standard code. Unfortunately, this led to a lot of browser-specific code that caused major incompatibilities with the different browser engines.
XHTML has much stricter specifications. XHTML code must be well formed, for example in XHTML code is always lower case, all tags must be closed or contain a closing slash, attributes must have a value etc. The validity of XHTML can be tested with the Validator of the W3C (select XHTML as the document type)
For newer projects, I would always use XHTML. Most older browser are able to render XHTML correctly. I don’t think older, outdated standards should be used unless it is necessary for legacy systems.