Course Overview
This course provided basic and intermediate HTML5 fundamental as well as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS3). It was designed to give an introduction to how webpages worked and the setup and layout of them so that later courses could expand upon this with JavaScript, PHP, and other databases or techniques that current webpages employ. The course touched lightly into JavaScript, mostly on how it interacted with HTML than how the actual language was coded as well as using Document Object Models for webpages instead of a static HTML page.
Course Reflection
Before taking this course, while I knew how to pull up the code for a webpage, it looked like some kind of foreign language, which at the time it was. Now, while most webpages, still might look a little wonky as it is using PHP, JavaScript, and DOM instead of pure HTML, but I can now understand what the webpage is trying to do, if not more. The foundation of my IT education is still getting put together, and while I want to advance into the more technical side of IT, I need to keep building up my foundation, so that I can safely move forward without getting lost in the depth of IT, as while the technical side constantly changes and updates, the foundation will almost always stay the same and will be a safe place to be able to fall back to if needed.
While HTML isn’t actually coding, it has a lot of the same concepts and troubleshooting steps. There’s a defined layout to it that needs to be followed in order for it to work properly, and if you mess up even a single piece of it, it could mess up an immense amount of information. I fortunately found this out the hard way when I was trying to design a static HTML website, everything was going along smoothly when suddenly, my columns didn’t align properly. After over 4 hours of troubleshooting, validating both the HTML and CSS several times, I realized that the class for one of the columns was spelled ‘leftcolunm’ instead of ‘leftcolumn’. I’ve always heard the story about a single misplaced comma or bracket breaking the entire code, but this put it into perspective, everything can validate perfectly, look beautiful, but one misplaced character that is hard to track down can break things in interesting ways.