From: Scott Stubberfield To: Subject: Thanks ! Date: Monday, September 25, 2000 10:39 PM Professor Thistle, You were my instructor for both Computer Concepts and Intro to the Internet. At the time I took your Interent class I knew nothing about how to design a web page. Sure I had seen a lot of web pages but I had never designed one before. At the time I didn't appreciate why for what god awful reason you made us do all our code by hand and not allow us to use a Web design tool. The reason I'm writing this email to you is to thank you for making that stipulation in your class. I am currently employed at a Network Solution company here in the city called Next Dimension. I am currently working on a Web based Sql database application. Sure your class didn't teach me everything I needed to know about Web design but I do think It gave me the solid fundamentals. Case in point. When we do web apps we are generally involved in the guts of the database programming and don't have the time or the skills to really deal with making a site look pretty. For that we contract the work out to another firm. When they finished their code and sent it to us the code was very messed up and they had no idea what was going on. They had designed the site using Macromedia DreamWeaver on a Mac. Well when the site was published to a real server and viewed through a real Non-Mac computer their images didn't fit properly. It was the way they had designed the page. It was a 3 column table with the header image spanning 3 columns and then below that the left most column was an image, the right column and image and the middle column was text. Well their images were set to the same height as what they thought the height of the text would be, Well they were wrong. ON a different system with different font sizes the height of that center cell grew very large and much beyond the specified height of the two side images. I was able to figure out the problem and fix it only because I know my code inside and out. Even if another application creates the code I always want to pick it apart and see how it is done. To make a long story short I would like to thank you for your courses and tell you to keep doing what you are doing. I think that you are doing your students justice in preparing them for the real world of web development. Feel free to show this to your sections as an example of what your class can lead to Thanks again Scott Stubberfield Next Dimension Inc.