Web_Development

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Bottom_of_the_Stack

2022-06-02 - Web Development - html/css

I'll start things off with the design goals of this very website and what I have done so far to get things going.

Unless things have changed drastically by the time you read this [which I doubt it has], it should be a fairly vanilla 1995 World Wide Web experience. There are a couple reasons I chose to go this route.

Aside from the glaring hurdle that is my complete lack of any formal or informal web development experience, I like keeping the UNIX philosophy in mind when working on my projects [although manipulated to mean exactly what I want it to mean at any given time]. For those unfamiliar, the basic principle is to design programs to do one thing and one thing well. I want this website to be a place where I throw my ideas into the void and can reference them later [and maybe share some of that knowledge to the few that find themselves here]. Although fun, interactive, dynamic features would be cool to look at, I think it, ultimately, restricts my ability to complete this goal effectively.

That isn't to say that I am completely against adding any scripting for the sake of learning or experimenting [this IS a hobby website after all], but I do want to be able to quickly document my progress without too much thought on aesthetic [aside from some font colors].

But let me get down to brass tacks, what have I done so far.

Well if I am being completely honest, we aren't even online yet. I bought a domain name from dynadot and have a Vultr VPS [hosting some other things at the moment], but haven't set anything else up. I'll look up some guides tomorrow [famous last words] to see how to get us up and running.

So that's what I haven't done. What I have done is started getting comfortable with HTML/CSS. I have written in other markup languages like Markdown and LaTeX so it wasn't too painful to pick up but getting used to syntax is something you can't really rush [maybe you can but I can't].

So, a few of the things I've learned so far:

  1. Basic HTML structure ie. Defining a page with "<!DOCTYPE html>" as well as <head>, <body>, and <html> tags.
  2. Other Basic HTML tags ie. <p>, <strong>, <em>, etc.
  3. How to link to a style sheet [a cascading one to be exact] with
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="$(LOCATION OF THE STYLE SHEET)" />
  4. Defining specific tags with id, ie. id="name_of_tag"
  5. Basic CSS syntax
  6. Referencing specific tags by id with #$(ID_NAME)

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