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Home > Teaching > Washington University > Website Design & Development > Advanced Assignments > Drop Caps, Formats, Definitions

Formatting, Drop Caps, Alternative Style Sheets

Start with these three paragraphs (the text comes from Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Frank_Baum):

L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and thirteen other novels based on the places and people of Oz. Several times during the development of the series, he declared that he had written his last Oz book and devoted himself to other works of fantasy fiction based in other magical lands, including The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, The Adventures of Father Goose and Queen Zixi of Ix. However, persuaded by popular demand, letters from children, and the failure of his new books, he returned to the series each time. All of his novels have fallen into public domain in most jurisdictions, and many are available through Project Gutenberg. In his last years Baum was addicted to morphine and wrote most of his books in a large birdcage in his backyard.

“Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cookstove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed inone corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar—except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole.”

The Wizard of Oz is a 1939 musical fantasy film based on L. Frank Baum's turn-of-the-century children's story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which a resourceful American girl is snatched up by a Kansas tornado and deposited in a fantastic land of witches, talking scarecrows, cowardly lions, and more. It stars Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, Billie Burke and Margaret Hamilton. Filming started on October 13, 1938 and was completed on March 16, 1939. The film premiered on August 12, 1939. It was shown on television for the first time on November 3, 1956 with a viewing audience estimated at 45 million people.

Do the following to those three paragraphs:

  1. Style all text. Instead of using pixels, use ems & percentages instead.
  2. Use this for the page title in the H1: Baum, Birdcages, & The Wizard of Oz. Make the ampersand look really cool.
  3. Make the "L." in the first paragraph look nice via the drop caps effect in CSS (if you're really feeling ambitious & want to play with a different kind of effect, check out Eric Meyer's "boxpunch" & try that).
  4. The second paragraph is quoted, so it should be in a blockquote. Line up the left margin of text so that the first quotation mark hangs outside the text. Make the quotation marks look really nice, either by choosing a stylish font or by using images.
  5. In the second paragraph, make the following words into styled definitions, using the following definitions:
    • Kansas: A midwestern state in the USA
    • garret: A room on the top floor of a house
    • cyclone: A violent rotating windstorm
  6. If you've learned about it, create a print stylesheet so that when I print, I get just plain text, without the drop cap & without the fancy hanging quotation mark.

Contact

Email scott@granneman.com
Voice 314-780-0489
Address
39 Summit Place
St. Louis, MO 63119
United States

Work

For work info, see WebSanity.

All content, unless under a Creative Commons license, is © 1997-2011 Scott Granneman.

(Take a look around—a lot of content is licensed under a Creative Commons license, which gives YOU a lot of freedom to reuse my work.)

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