Using the John Milton page as a starting point, I figured out the basics of JavaScript, in which I learned how to use a confirm box, which would say whatever I wanted it to say after the user had prompted it by clicking on the first box, which I could also manipulate. The main challenge when I got to the "News or Sports" application was how to get a box that would allow the user to select from a number of different choices while still using text. The solution that I came up with turned out to be sort of a compromise between having the user use only numbers and only text. The prompt box worked best for this as opposed to an alert box or a confirm box, because in an alert box only allows the user to click "Ok" or "Cancel." After establishing the prompt boxes, it was necessary to create a case sensitive statement that would direct the user to the appropriate page. This is where parseInt came in. According to David Flanagan in JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, “[parseInt] convert[s] and return[s] any number at the beginning of a string, ignoring any trailing non-numbers. parseint parses only integers…” (165). After creating a route to each page, I used document.write to establish the links to each of the corresponding BBC pages.
To view my JavaScript pages click here.
Information Retrieval
As the exercise asked, I used the Bing search engine to conduct a search using Boolean logic. As I am planning a meal for this Saturday, celebrating the American holiday of thanksgiving, but am not quite sure which recopies I will be preparing, I would probably be classified as an anomalous state of knowledge (ASK) user. There is no specific piece of information that I know that I want to retrieve.
I first keyed in the terms “vegetarian AND thanksgiving.” Bing turned up 4,780,000 results for this request. When I searched “vegetarian OR thanksgiving,” Bing found 28,300,000 results. After searching “vegetarian NOT thanksgiving” 20,400,000 results turned up, and “thanksgiving NOT vegetarian” turned up 22,300,000 results. Using this search tool, AND narrowed the search while OR broadened it. NOT isolated the search so that it only turned up documents containing one term but not the other.
In order to see how Bing filters keywords (whether it includes stop words or not) I typed in the question “Where can I find thanksgiving recipes that are vegetarian friendly?” Bing turned up 522,000 results, the first five of which were relevant to my query. The seventh result, however, paid attention to the term “friendly” and gave me information on “diabetic-friendly thanksgiving recipes.”
Doing a manual search using “thanksgiving+recipes+vegetarian,” Bing came up with 24,800,000 results, four out of the first ten were relevant to my query. The other six simply contained “thanksgiving,” “recipes,” and “vegetarian” somewhere in their documents.
In addition to the perspective of a user on an information retrieval system, there are also the perspectives of the source and the system itself. The most efficient index structure is the inverted file, which I arranged for two documents. An image of my arrangement of the documents “museum and Durer Rembrandt Turner of Constable gallery” and “ancient which gallery Egyptian artifacts Assyrian museum” is shown below. Click on the image below to view a larger display of it.
I first keyed in the terms “vegetarian AND thanksgiving.” Bing turned up 4,780,000 results for this request. When I searched “vegetarian OR thanksgiving,” Bing found 28,300,000 results. After searching “vegetarian NOT thanksgiving” 20,400,000 results turned up, and “thanksgiving NOT vegetarian” turned up 22,300,000 results. Using this search tool, AND narrowed the search while OR broadened it. NOT isolated the search so that it only turned up documents containing one term but not the other.
In order to see how Bing filters keywords (whether it includes stop words or not) I typed in the question “Where can I find thanksgiving recipes that are vegetarian friendly?” Bing turned up 522,000 results, the first five of which were relevant to my query. The seventh result, however, paid attention to the term “friendly” and gave me information on “diabetic-friendly thanksgiving recipes.”
Doing a manual search using “thanksgiving+recipes+vegetarian,” Bing came up with 24,800,000 results, four out of the first ten were relevant to my query. The other six simply contained “thanksgiving,” “recipes,” and “vegetarian” somewhere in their documents.
In addition to the perspective of a user on an information retrieval system, there are also the perspectives of the source and the system itself. The most efficient index structure is the inverted file, which I arranged for two documents. An image of my arrangement of the documents “museum and Durer Rembrandt Turner of Constable gallery” and “ancient which gallery Egyptian artifacts Assyrian museum” is shown below. Click on the image below to view a larger display of it.
Databases
Relational databases were first designed as a way to represent data without redundancies so that they could be updated centrally and accessed throughout a system with only the relevant information visible to users. A Database Table consists of rows and columns with each row representing a particular thing, and each column representing a particular property of those things. For example, a database on a music collection might contain a database table containing data on all of the compact discs with columns labeled “Album Title,” “Artist,” “Year,” and “Record Label” and rows that represent each CD; a database table containing data on all of the vinyl records with the same row labels; and a database table containing data on all of the tapes with these same row labels. To access a particular set of data, a user could search one or more fields in a table. For instance, “select album_title, year from tapes where album_title = purple_rain;” would pull up the only the year and album title from any tapes whose album title was listed as Purple Rain. Just as it is possible to search many fields at the same time, it is also possible to search many tables at a time by. For instance, in the music example, it would be possible to pull up all of the records (not vinyl) in the collection regardless of the form by: “select * from tapes, CDs, vinyl records; “. This search would bring up all of the records.
Markup and Cascading Style Sheets
The World Wide Web Consortium originally created Cascading Style Sheets so that it would be possible to write web pages without weighing down the html with a lot of extra code creating with styling commands. Because Cascading Style Sheets allow designers to make generalized changes through the use of commands specific to them as well as classes, and they do not impose storage constraints, they allow webpage designers a lot more freedom in their work.
Some of the problems with Cascading Style Sheets to do with the fact that they are written in ASCII are that a) the writer must know English in order to utilize them, and b) the writer must be very exact, and cannot make any mistakes in the code, or else it will not turn out the way s/he intends it to look. Therefore, Cascading Style Sheets require a certain amount of prior knowledge to create. They are not accessible to the wider public. Fortunately, this problem has been realized by software developers, and templates, like the one I have used for this blog, have been created for those who are not as familiar with HTML, resulting in the surge of internet usage around the world.
I created a few of my own cascading style sheets that I have applied to my webpages by creating an internal style sheet, which I linked to the html documents that I had already written. I chose an internal style sheet over external and inline style sheets because I wanted to create a unique style sheet for each page, and I wanted to separate the style of the words from the content of my html.
Some of the problems with Cascading Style Sheets to do with the fact that they are written in ASCII are that a) the writer must know English in order to utilize them, and b) the writer must be very exact, and cannot make any mistakes in the code, or else it will not turn out the way s/he intends it to look. Therefore, Cascading Style Sheets require a certain amount of prior knowledge to create. They are not accessible to the wider public. Fortunately, this problem has been realized by software developers, and templates, like the one I have used for this blog, have been created for those who are not as familiar with HTML, resulting in the surge of internet usage around the world.
I created a few of my own cascading style sheets that I have applied to my webpages by creating an internal style sheet, which I linked to the html documents that I had already written. I chose an internal style sheet over external and inline style sheets because I wanted to create a unique style sheet for each page, and I wanted to separate the style of the words from the content of my html.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
