The End of Chapter 1
Well, that’s it, made it through Web 101! On to a deep-dive into JavaScript. But first, some final questions:
1 | “Think back on your first day of class. How did you think websites were built? Now how do you think they’re built? What’s the difference in your thinking?”
Outside of knowing the names of some of the different languages that are used to build website, I knew very little.
2 | “What have you gained through this course beyond code? Beyond technical savvy?”
There’s definitely been a bit of personal development as well. That’s been a focus of mine for the past couple of years but this course showed me how to apply those concepts to my work life as well as my personal life, and how that two really go hand-in-hand. How your habits and attitude impact your productivity and focus in the work environment.
3 | “Where do you think you’re headed? Why? How? What are you going to do to encourage that?”
I really enjoy CSS, there’s so much more to learn and I could sit down and nerd out on it for hours, get sucked into YouTube black-holes, listen to endless podcasts. If there’s a way to turn that into an entire career I’d be down. In the meantime, I’ll keep doing self-study and I’m planning on helping some dance and artist friends out with their sites which will give me a chance to gain some more experience and build a portfolio at the same time!
4 | “What kinds of projects do you see yourself working on in 10 months?”
Again, solely based on what we’ve done so far, I’m really enjoying front-end development, and more specifically, CSS. I could see myself freelancing and building sites for small businesses and I could easily have a side gig creating sites for people in the dance community since I’m already so connected within that world.
5 | “Why is it generally a good idea to position CSS <link>s between <head></head> and JS <script>s just before </body>? Do you know of any exceptions?”
I suppose it’s because we want elements to render with the styles applied, so we link the style sheets at the top so they render first? Then the JavaScript is last because we want the elements and css to render first, the JS is kind of pointless if they’ve yet to render. Plus, the DOM gets parsed from top to bottom so I assume if you put JS at the top it wouldn’t be able to access the elements below it until the page it fully loaded.
6 | “Consider HTML5 as an open web platform. What are the building blocks of HTML5?”
- expanded semantic text markup
- additional form elements
- video and audio elements
- new javascript API
- canvas and SVG
- new communication API
- geolocation API
- web worker API
- new data storage
7 | “What’s the difference between the :nth-of-type() and :nth-child() selectors?”
The :nth-of-type()selector targets the whole DOM, looks for a specific element type, such as <h1>, and continues down the DOM until it gets the the “nth” of that type. The :nth-child() selector targets the parents element of the child you’re looking for, starts at the top and looks for the “nth” time that child appears in the parent element.
8 | “What is CSS-selector specificity, and how does it work?”
There is a hierarchy to CSS-selector specificity, with inline styles being at the top, followed by; ids; classes, attributes and pseudo-classes; and the bottom of the food chains is elements and pseudo-elements. This hierarchy determines which styles get applied.
9 | “What resources do you use to learn about the latest in front-end development and design?”
Mostly YouTube videos but I also follow some Web Dev related tags on Medium and several podcasts that I’m trying to do a better job keeping up with.