HTML/CSS Class Completion
Today is the last day of our 8 week HTML/CSS on-line instructor lead class @AustinCodingAcademy. It has been a lot of information in a short period of time, but a great start experience. I really did not understand how websites worked before this class and now see so many possibilities to utilize in my career. I want to help automate field service companies, and there are so many things that can be done to make work for production more efficient. Especially in collecting and serving up information.
In the course time was spent to help make you a more well rounded person, and understand how and why people do what they do. Much of this was in line with past manager training that I have taken. It was great to see others prospective from what I had seen before. One of the topics that rings true with me, is leading with the “WHY” and that my why may be much different than yours.
I came into this class wanting to learn how to develop on-line interactive training. I have learn tools to build that interface. Future class will teach me the data base side, and give me more coding/logic experience. On my final project I was able to build a mini interactive training, so I defiantly feel I am on the right track to reach my goals. I will continue to develop mini modules that ultimately will bring me to my goal. As I develop these I will share with contacts I have in the industry and start building interest for investment.
Over the next 10 months, I hope to be storing progress and other data base items. I am also very interested in mobile app development. I see myself developing some simple apps that help people be more productive in their field service type jobs.
During the class I was thought how to link CSS style sheets and JS style sheets to my project. These links can be placed at different locations in the HTML code but generally you would place the CSS link in the head of the document and the JS link just before the end of the document body. This is preferred because you want critical styling information loaded first, and functionality code loaded later. This will make your web page move efficient in loading and give a better user experience.
The basic building blocks of HTML 5 are: semantic text markup, new form elements, video and audio support, new javascript API, canvas, new communication API, geolocation API, web worker API, and new data storage.
As your web pages get bigger and more complicated being able to select the element you want to modify in your code, becomes even more important. Instead if giving every element an ID or Class you can use selectors like :nth-of-type() or :nth-child(). The :nth of a type will look for the specific number you call and apply your CSS or other to that type. Where nth of a child can be any type of element (span, image, div, etc…). These are so critical to limit have to create tons of names.
Learning how CSS Specificity works was also critical when styling an web page. Specificity is a weight that is applied to a given CSS declaration, determined by the number of each selector type in the matching selector. When multiple declarations have equal specificity, the last declaration found in the CSS is applied to the element.
Over the past week I spent a lot of time learning different API’s for HTML5. I have started to use canvas, geolocation, and drag & drop in some of my projects. I am very interested in spending more time on drag & drop for interactive training. I can see how I can use it to have users move items on the screen and connect virtual test equipment. I added a small amount of this in my final project and can not wait to create larger scale training.
