– Joshua lent me the fantastic Animals DVD, Ricky Gervais’ first stand up show. It’s better than Politics, especially the section on Genesis.
– I started my final bit of ICT Coursework, Website Design! What made me splutter, though, was the requirements for a Standard and Extension project. Let me explain…
To get a grade C, we need to Enter text and edit text. All right, no problems with that. Next, though, insert clip art. Clip art?!? I don’t fucking think so! Insert audio, if you’re talking about background music, go to hell. Seriously. Hyperlinks, well yes, I suppose they are useful as being, well, the entire basis of HTML. Font type and size, is OK, followed by the ominous sounding background. Um… what about it? An ugly repeating JPEG?
It gets worse. For an ‘Extension’, we need to use importation of data from another application. Well since I’ll be using Notepad and Nucleus CMS, I guess that limits me to copy and paste. Image manipulation, fine. The next one confused me totally. Web bots. At first I thought we’d be coding a spider to crawl the web for GCSE! But no, apparently, ‘web bots’ means ‘a tracking counter.’ Cause every professional business website has one of those sitting proudly on the front page.
Forms is cool. CGI Scripts is even nicer. And just when I think the syllabus has gone sane again, along comes the last requirement: Use of tables for layout.
For those of you not familiar with web design, that’s a big like saying Use of an abacas in Maths. There is no way I am using tables to layout my site. It’s gonna be valid XHTML for god’s sake! CSS all the way… I think I’ll write my own syllabus 
Btw, you can see the site develop named Spotlight Cinema. The premise is a small chain of five cinemas in London, so linking all the films and timetables together should be a bit of a challenge. It’s not high on the realism scale that a cinema chain would use Notepad and a Content Management System designed primarily for blogging, but hey, it’s only GCSE after all.
