TITLE: Learning CSS By Doing It
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 31, 2023  2:35 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:

 I ran across
 <a href="https://buttondown.email/robinrendle/archive/the-many-frontiers-of-css/">
    this blog post</a>
 earlier this summer when browsing articles on CSS, as one does
 while learning CSS for a fall course.  Near the end, the writer
 says:

 <blockquote><em>
 This is thoroughly exciting to me, and I don't wanna whine about
 improvements in CSS, but it's a bit concerning since I feel like
 what the web is now capable of is slipping through my fingers.
 And I guess that's what I'm worried about; I no longer have a
 good idea of how these things interact with each other, or where
 the frontier is now.
 <br><br>
 The map of CSS in my mind is real messy, confused, and teetering
 with details that I can't keep straight in my head.
 </em></blockquote>

 Imagine how someone feels as they learn CSS basically from the
 beginning and tries to get a handle both on how to use it
 effectively and how to teach it effectively.  There is so much
 there...  The good news, of course, is that our course is for
 folks with no experience, learning the basics of HTML, CSS, and
 JavaScript from the beginning, so there is only so far we can
 hope to go in fifteen weeks anyway.

 My impressions of HTML and CSS at this point are quite similar:
 very little syntax, at least for big chunks of the use cases,
 and lots and lots of vocabulary.  Having convenient access to
 documentation such as that available at
 <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS">
    developer.mozilla.org</a>
 via the web and inside VS Code makes exploring all of the options
 more manageable in context.

 I've been watching
 <a href="https://blog.humphd.org">
    Dave Humphrey</a>'s
 videos for his
 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJgO3yLojCBNVeOHeVRIqex7RojF23Qk6">
    WEB 222 course</a>
 at Seneca College and learning tons.  Special thanks to Dave for
 showing me a neat technique to use when learning -- and teaching
 -- web development: take a page you use all the time and try to
 recreate it using HTML and CSS, without looking at the page's own
 styles.  He has done that a couple times now in his videos, and I
 was able to integrate the ideas we covered about the two languages
 in previous videos as Dave made the magic work.  I have tried it
 once on my own.  It's good fun and a challenging exercise.

 Learning layout by viewing page source used to be easier in the
 old days, when pages were simpler and didn't include dozens of CSS
 imports or thousands of scripts.  Accepting the extra challenge of
 not looking at a page's styles in 2023 is usually the simpler path.

 Two re-creations I have on tap for myself in the coming days are a
 simple Wikipedia-like page for myself (I'm not notable enough to
 have an actual Wikipedia page, of course) and a page that acts like
 my Mastodon home page, with anchored sidebars and a scrolling feed
 in between.  Wish me luck.
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