My reading journal for Code Fellows.
This reading was important because it covers the basics of HTML, CSS, and JS. We are learning about creating web pages and these three come together to make a well structured web page that is styled nicely and has functionality. Without any one of the three, you will have a web page that is majorly lacking in some way. Understanding the basics of each and how to combine them is essential to creating real working websites.
Semantic Markup is important because it defines some elements more specifically based on their function. Some examples are:
<strong><blockquote><cite>All of these are semantic elements and give the text they contain a different role based on what that element does. It is important to use semantic elements properly because they convey a lot of information about your page and the contents of each element. This information can be used by search engines, page readers, and other programs to do something different with that element based on its semantic tag.
CSS is used to style HTML elements by assigning rules to each element. You can use external, internal, and inline CSS, but external is best practice and most common. However, if you have a small change to make on only a single page or maybe just a single element, internal and inline offer you a quick way to make the change right there. You can also mix and match all three types together in the same HTML file. Remember that CSS rules are applied based how specific the rule is. This means that inline CSS should overwrite all other styling and the general flow of execution would be external -> internal -> inline. Also, because the file is read from top to bottom, if there are two identical selectors the second (bottom) one will be the rule that is applied.
In JavaScript, and programming in general, variables are very important for storing and calling data. JavaScript has three different ways to declare variables:
let is used for variables where the value can changeconst is used when you know the value of the variable will remain constantvar is an old term and is generally only used in JavaScript from 2015 or olderYou can store numbers, strings, and booleans in variables. It is important to remember that when you get user input, it will usually be stored in a string. Strings do not have any numerical value, even if they contain a number, so they can’t be compared with numbers.
Interesting to learn about the <sup> and <sub> tags. I didn’t know this was possible in HTML, but it is nice to know in case you need it.
Arrays - I haven’t worked with or learned about arrays prior to this reading. I look forward to learning more about how they can be used.
Switch - There are many times where I want to use if statements, but it doesn’t feel like the right solution. This seems to be the command I was looking for. I am excited to learn more and try the practical application of switch.
Also, just realized that the reading assignment stopped right before switch, but that’s too bad I can’t unread it now. I still look forward to learning more about it.