I, too, am teaching a web production course in the spring and would be quite eager to hear what others consider good texts and essential areas to be covered.
Core components of CSS (Good inventory of CSS resources at http://www.web-graphics.com) box model display types (block, inline, table, none) Javascript for dynamically changing styles Core components of DOM (document object model) and Javascript methods -- This provides the essentials for cross browser DHTML, functional in Win/IE Mac, all platforms in Mozilla. See http://www.zvon.org for useful DOM reference. document.getElementById() document.getElementByAttribute() Parent/child node operators innerHTML (not w3c, but de facto standard) Accessing form element values. Enabling/disabling form elements. See http://uzilla.net/uzilla/using_uzilla/design.cfm or http://clemsontraining.com/schedule.html for demos of the power of w3c compliant scripting methods. At this point, Netscape 4 is only worth dealing with in the context of graceful degradation (see wired.com design in NS4). Mozilla is a great way to teach this stuff. The DOM Inspector and, to a lessor degree, the Javascript debugger provide excellent tools and otherwise unavailable tools. It turns out, the UI in Mozilla is written in an alternate to HTML (called XUL, pronounced "xool") that has a largely w3c based DOM, so there are more advanced opportunities there. The full text of the O'Reilly book on Mozilla is available btw: http://books.mozdev.org/chapters/index.html Chapter 5 on scripting offers a good introduction to DOM. There's a college curriculum development effort just getting underway: http://mozilla-university.dnsalias.org/cgi-bin/wiki?HomePage Alas, I don't have much input on the low end of a curriculum -- I teach a couple from MacroMedia classes that involve hands-on project based instruction, drilling in table construction and presentation markup through practice with a touch of css (http://www.macromedia.com/support/training/instructor_led_curriculum/ft_to_ html.html) hth, Andy Edmonds Human Factors, Clemson Univ 864-624-9776 http://www.clemson.edu/~kedmond