Web Design 2020, Part 2

[dewline]

So, yes, I started relearning web coding this afternoon. The first "class" runs about two hours total, but it's broken down by the course producers into 2- to 10-minute chunks. That makes it easier to study and work through. Would any of you recommend the Mozilla Foundation's developer tutorials as another resource?

Comments

[malovich]

Mozilla is generally a good resource.

Web coding is usually a combination of technologies; what's on the server and what gets sent to the user's browser when they go to a server's webpage.

The entire combination is known as a 'stack' or 'webstack'. What it is composed of is up to the development team and is limited by the technologies that exists out there. For instance, at work here, we use a php-msqli-html-javascript stack (pretty common), with some frameworks to organize and focus our code development.

So, what are they starting you on?

[dewline]

Basics of HTML 5 to start with. Specifically, what's making HTML 5 different from HTML 4. "Strong" and "Em" vs. "bold" and "italic", style tags, a few other things I'm not yet clear on. There's more to follow, I expect, and I'll get to that later today.

[malovich]

Well, that's all ancient history. You're becoming familiar with very basic tools of building a website, which is a start. The markup you may be familiar with and many HTML5 elements have quite a bit of power to them.

Styles refers to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which is a script language that all browsers have to some degree that effects the browsers' rendering engine and can be *very* powerful. It works on a hierarchy of selection rules to target groups of elements (elements, classes, id's and lastly, style tags) to make sweeping layout and design changes to a webpage. Do pay attention to it and for an example of a CSS design framework, check out twitter's bootstrap which is an *incredibly* popular design framework.

[dewline]

*makes some notes on those points*

From what I've seen in the basic coursework I've done so far, there's style notations you can make within HTML, and then there's CSS as you explain it, which I expect to explore further in later courses...?

[malovich]

Of course.

The HTML style tag accesses the same script as CSS and uses the same syntax; the hierarchy has the style tag override all other considerations. CSS sheets are loaded in the head of a page which define the style resources available and basic layout properties.