Week 8 Readings 
HTML Tutorial: 
Web browsers read HTML documents and display them. HTML is the language that websites are written in. Specifically, it is a markup language for describing web pages. When I read that it achieves this description with tags, I was confused at first. As I continued to read and to try it, I understood that better.
It also took me a little while to figure out the difference between the head and the heading in HTML. Reading the descriptions and definitions didn't help much, but seeing the visualization did. The head is like the header of a Word document, whereas the <h1> is the heading within the text.
I learned that HTML5 is the current form. It seemed curious that there is no difference between htm and html when naming a document of that type. It has been my experience that this is a specific language; that seems pretty "loose" to me.
The basic structure of an HTML document makes sense. It has to begin and end with the same tag, one opening and one closing. The body is visible on the site. Attributes set the appearance, which is also sensible to me.
The most helpful part of the tutorial was in trying it myself. I plan on coming back to this and trying it more.

HTML Cheatsheet:
Tags are useful! They can set text, links, and lists. They can format attributes. They also add tables and graphs, not just simple text.
I was thinking as I read the Cheatsheet that it doesn't look as foreign as it used to. The abbreviations make sense and the commands are pretty clear. I'm not saying that I know all about it, but it doesn't look as strange to me.

Pratter, Intro to HTML, Chapter 2:
The chapter begins with a disclaimer that the information about HTML that it supplies is applied to SAS web technology. It never defined SAS outright, but from what the chapter said about SAS, it seems to mean the part that we can see. It also seemed to have more to do with images like jpegs and graphs than text.
Even though HTML is tedious type, because of its repetitive nature, people generally prefer to write it out, rather than using the IDEs, which would cut out some of the repeats. I thought people liked shortcuts!
The chapter gave an interesting definition for a webpage: an ASCII text file with tags inserted to format and display text. Put more simply, it's an ASCII file that we can see. It's an interesting thing to think that you're familiar with something (like a webpage), and then get a different perspective on it.
Then there is some discussion of the difference between HTML and XHTML. The main difference seems to be that XHTML's format is more dependent on being done properly. It always needs a closing tag, whereas HTML doesn't. It has a document type definition, which means that the pages that it creates must adhere to certain rules. This gives XHTML pages a more uniform look that is more standardized.

Goans, Beyond HTML:
Content Management Systems seem to be ideal for use by people who are not IS people. All of the librarians and related staff were able to contribute to the system, even if they knew nothing about HTML. That's because it isn't necessary to write the content in using the HTML language. The reason for this is that the content is not connected to the layout and design commands of the web page. The CMS controls presentation and administration. It also seems like a good system to use because it can be repurposed and reused, different subject areas can be represented, and it can grow to accommodate increasing documents.
I can see how this would be helpful in a library setting. It would be easy to add content without needing to be an IT person.