HTML, CSS - The Basics

HTML and CSS

I’m not sure where I came by or developed the notion that HTML and CSS are simple. Simple to understand and simple to implement. Simple to make the markup and code you write do what it is you intend for it to do. But I did. And I think it has made learning more about them more difficult. Because while compared to other aspects of web and application development, they may indeed be somewhat easier to understand, in and of themselves they are not. Which is what I have discovered over the past few weeks. I think it’s important to look at this, to understand why I thought what I thought, because unchecked assumptions can be dangerous.

I don’t have a really solid answer or reason for this particular belief. I think it stems from the fact that I’ve been exposed to and messing around with HTML and CSS for years. I know and understand some of the foundational concepts, elements, tags, attributes and so on. But the interaction between all the various parts, coupled with CSS, make it so much more challenging. And when you start to introduce the various frameworks things just scale up from there.

As I mentioned last time, I’m working through a book by Shay Howe. It’s been great thus far and has served to reintroduce and reinforce things that I only partially understood. I’m going to keep plugging along and hope to be able to make use of what I learn in a project that I’m about to start. I’ve got the rough scope of work laid out and am hoping to begin in the next week or two.

GitHub Challenge

I’ve managed to make some sort of commit everyday for the past week. They haven’t been great commits, mostly updates to existing repositories, but they weren’t totally superfluous either. Once I have a project up and running it’ll get easier and I’ll be less concerned about the exactly nature of the things that I’m committing. The whole point of the challenge is to get you looking at, learning, and writing some type of code everyday. And in that respect I’m doing okay.